Ensuring Security and Transparency in Distributed Communication in IoT ecosystems using Blockchain Technology: Protocols, Applications and Challenges

Abstract

Internet of Things(IoT) has become a widespread ubiquitous technology connecting seamlessly most of real world applications. The security, trust and privacy issues are still serious challenges in IoT. No solutions have been successfully implemented mainly focusing on security. Blockchain technology seems to be the viable solution to maintain the security, transparency, auditability, immutability and privacy in a decentralized manner without any third party intermediary. The main objective of this paper is based on comparative analysis in the existing literature comprising of consensus mechanisms, smart contracts, architectures, service platforms and application use cases in blockchain based IoT. This paper presents a comprehensive review and the flow of information starting from: vast IoT applications and its main challenges in it adoption, basic fundamentals of blockchain, integration of blockchain with IoT and applications. Finally some important challenges were discussed in order to have novel network of nodes globally which maintains security, privacy, transparency throughout the communication medium.