Distributed Ledger Technology and the Internet of Things

Abstract

Distributed Ledger Technologies have promising applications in the Internet of Things. However, scalability and support for micropayments remain problems for blockchain-based applications, therefore other alternatives such as IOTA should be considered. This work reports on an experimental evaluation of IOTA on several different IoT platforms. We show that even though the communication overhead to join the IOTA network can be significantly reduced by adapting a proxy-based architecture, the computational overhead remains high. We conclude that IOTA is not currently suitable for battery-powered IoT devices.