Performance Evaluation of a Blockchain-Oriented Secure Validation Mechanism for 5G-Integrated IoT Networks

Abstract

With the billions of devices that are connected in 5G-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) networks, industries have been revolutionized, due to high-speed data transmission, ultra-low latency as well as large scale connectivity that 5g offers. Yet, the growing number of IoT devices also creates serious security and privacy issues like unauthorized access, data breaches, and cyber-attacks. Security frameworks are dependent, centralized, and they cannot establish trust, scalability, and resilience against attack. With its potential to offer decentralized validation, secure authentication, and tamper-proof data storage, blockchain technology has therefore emerged as a promising solution to these concerns. Through this work, we investigate the combination of blockchain-based validation mechanisms with $\mathbf{5 G}$ Internet of Things networks to allow more secure, private, and integritypreserving networks. This usually involves lightweight consensus mechanisms like Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) to enhance transaction efficiency while lowering energy consumption. Edge computing along with blockchain also helps in processing of data at the spot while waiting to be encoded which saves time and decrease latency of IoT applications. Beyond that, AI-driven security models provide higher accuracy in threat detection and anomaly identification in $\mathbf{5 G}$ IoT networks available in blockchain. However, notwithstanding the benefits, issues such as privacy, scalability, regulatory compliance, and computational overhead are still emergent areas of research. In contrast, on the other hand, enhancing the security frameworks of $\mathbf{5 G ~} \mathbf{~ I o T}$ ecosystems built on blockchain through post-quantum cryptography, federated learning, and self-sovereign identity management will lay a crucial role in the developments of computer-based solutions coming in the future. Upon learning the state-of-the-art blockchain validation methods and their contributions to the Internet of Things security, we analyze and evaluate the future works and threats on the secure 5G Internet of Things in this study.