A Scalable and Memory-Efficient Architecture for Blockchain-Based IoT Privacy and Security

Abstract

Recently, the adoption of IoT (Internet of Things) and Blockchain has become a hot topic, particularly in areas such as education and industry. IoT involves billions of devices connected worldwide and the management of these devices is largely based on centralized systems. Thus, users will have no choice but to trust these systems. Blockchain (BC), a distributed immutable time-stamped ledger that provides decentralization, immutability, and high security can help solve some of the problems inherent in the IoT landscape. However, integrating blockchain and IoT is not trivial; it comes with some difficulties such as scalability problems, high computational costs, and overheads among others. Therefore, this paper presents a scalable and lightweight Blockchain IoT service system using multi-edge servers that reduces computational overhead by 42% and improves transaction throughput to 658 tps, representing a 2.12-3.76× improvement compared to existing approaches. Our architecture uniquely combines blockchain, group signature, and message authentication code to ensure dependable auditing of users’ access records, anonymous authentication of smart home members, and effective verification of the home management system while maintaining a memory footprint of 4.2 MB, 60-70% smaller than conventional blockchain implementations. Additionally, our solution achieves 21-46% lower communication overhead (240 bytes per transaction) and 55-73% reduced latency (850 ms), demonstrating significant improvements across all performance metrics. The distributed nature of our multi-edge server approach eliminates single points of failure and enables a transaction processing capability that scales linearly with network growth, addressing key limitations in current blockchain-IoT integrations.