Integration of IoT and Distributed Ledger Technologies: A Survey, Challenges, and Future Directions

Abstract

IoT data demands are growing, with Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) offering secure data management, provided they can meet scaling and efficiency requirements that are more restrictive than in conventional application environments. This article comprehensively surveys 27 DLTs of varying paradigms and implementation methods, proposes a scoring method for determining DLT-IoT integration suitability, and then applies that method to the surveyed DLTs. Six DLTs were shortlisted as the most promising, which were then subjected to in-depth analysis around three IoT use cases: health-IoT, e-commerce and automotive manufacturing. We discuss the viability of lightweight DLTs and identify crucial future research directions.