A Survey of Blockchain Applications in IoT Systems

Abstract

This paper presents an extensive study of the different ways the Internet of Things (IoT) applications exploit the recently developed blockchain technology. Even though the blockchain technology was originally presented as a security mechanism, its numerous benefits such as decentralization, immutability, persistence, anonymity and auditability can be used by IoT systems in different ways. More specifically, we classify the ways IoT systems exploit blockchain into three categories: resource management, decentralized information sharing, and IoT security. The comprehensive study of the applications of the blockchain technology in the different IoT domains presented in this paper sheds the light on the future research directions in the integration of the two technologies.