Blockchain Engineering for the Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology has a potential to bring the benefits of intelligently interconnecting not just computers and humans, but most of everyday things. IoT has a promise of opening significant business process improvement opportunities leading to economic growth and cost reductions. However, there are many challenges facing IoT, including significant scalability and security challenges due to the integration of potentially huge number of things into the network. Many of scalability and security issues stem from a centralized, primarily client/server, architecture of IoT systems and frameworks. Blockchain technology, as a relativelly new approach to decentralized computation and assets management and transfer, has a potential to help solve a number of scalability and security issues that IoT is facing, primarilly through the removal of centralized points of failure for such systems. As such, blockchain technology and IoT integration provides a promising direction and it has recently generated significant research interest, e.g., [4].