Exploring the Landscape: A Systematic Review on the Issues, Technologies, and Solutions related to the Integration of Blockchain with IoT

Abstract

Over the past few years, the smart city concept has become a prominent solution to address urban challenges, including economic, social, and environmental issues. These cities strive to offer superior services in healthcare, energy management, transportation, and education by leveraging IoT devices. These devices are pivotal in data collection, analysis, and facilitating citizen interactions. Incorporating IoT applications into our surroundings augments automation, efficiency, and user comfort. To achieve this vision, it is imperative to ensure robust security, privacy, effective deployment, authentication, and resilience against cyber-attacks. Several recent studies have shown promising results regarding the use of blockchain for addressing IoT security concerns, especially in access control and authentication domains. The smart city concept, while beneficial, still faces numerous challenges regarding information security and privacy. With its unique characteristics like auditability, immutability, transparency, and decentralization, blockchain can significantly boost the growth of smart cities and rectify communication issues among IoT devices. This research explores blockchain\'s potential to resolve access control and authentication challenges in IoT when merged with it. It will also offer an in-depth analysis and evaluation of recently proposed solutions in the literature focusing on integrating IoT with blockchain.