Intelligent Blockchain of Things

Abstract

IoT is the new frontier through which things are connected and production systems are made to work across various industries. However, as more and more IoT ecosystems are being implemented and extended there are a number of concerns that follow such as trust, security and efficiency. Some challenges implicitly involved in these levels of accountabilities are due to its decentralized, transparent and secure distributed ledger technology; Blockchain provides reasonable solutions to these challenges. This chapter also presents the IBoT system, which is a combination of Blockchain and IoT to address challenges arising from IoT systems. The first section of the chapter discusses the conceptualization of strategies between the two technologies, Blockchain and IoT, and how the interoperability is relevant to accomplishing major issues like data credibility, openness and decentralization. More specifically, it goes through key components that make up IBoT such as smart contracts, consensus algorithms valid for IoT and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Thus, analyzing this process, the given chapter outlines the possibility of IBoT to revolutionize IoT environments by providing safe authentication, shared encryption keys, as well as easily controlled and not trustful data sharing processes. The major issue of trust and inefficiency in the original IoT system is discussed and specific points of how the problem can be solved with the help of Blockchain are defined. In this chapter, the reader should be able to get a clear understanding of how IBoT can instead of transforming IoT, can augment IoT by improving on its security, latency and energy consumption. From the observations, it is clear that IBoT not only builds more reliable and transparent IoT network but it also greatly contributes to the effectiveness of the operation through data processing and analysis that happens in real-time. This chapter thus brings out the implication of IBoT, considering the challenges, the legal and policy implications and the future research agenda. They provide the outline of further developments and general impact on the fields like smart production, telemedicine and self-driving cars and place IBoT among actors initiating the following generation of IoT infrastructure and networks.