The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming our physical world into a complex and dynamic system of connected devices on an unprecedented scale. Connecting everyday physical objects is creating new business models, improving processes and reducing costs and risks. Recently, blockchain technology has received a lot of attention from the community as a possible solution to overcome security issues in IoT. However, traditional blockchains (such as the ones used in Bitcoin and Ethereum) are not well suited to the resource-constrained nature of IoT devices and also with the large volume of information that is expected to be generated from typical IoT deployments. To overcome these issues, several researchers have presented lightweight instances of blockchains tailored for IoT. For example, proposing novel data structures based on blocks with decoupled and appendable data. However, these researchers did not discuss how the consensus algorithm would impact their solutions, i.e., the decision of which consensus algorithm would be better suited was left as an open issue. In this paper, we improved an appendable-block blockchain framework to support different consensus algorithms through a modular design. We evaluated the performance of this improved version in different emulated scenarios and studied the impact of varying the number of devices and transactions and employing different consensus algorithms. Even adopting different consensus algorithms, results indicate that the latency to append a new block is less than 161ms (in the more demanding scenario) and the delay for processing a new transaction is less than 7ms, suggesting that our improved version of the appendable-block blockchain is efficient and scalable, and thus well suited for IoT scenarios. * The first and second authors have the same contribution for the present research.
In the last few years, novel approaches for using blockchain to solve Internet of Things (IoT) security and dependability issues have been proposed. Currently, different solutions were applied to Smart Homes, Smart Cities, Smart Grids, Supply Chains, Industry, and Vehicular Networks scenarios. Despite of that, the main advantages on the adoption of different architectures, models and algorithms proposed in the state of art of blockchain in IoT scenarios are not yet clear. This paper presents some discussion about the usage of blockchain technology in IoT environments and proposes a layer model of blockchains for IoT. In addition, we present an overview of the latest research regarding network architectures, consensus algorithms, data management, and applications. Finally, this paper presents open issues and future trends about blockchain in IoT.
Blockchain emerged as a solution for data integrity, non-repudiation, and availability in different applications. Data sensitive scenarios, such as Health Care, can also benefit from these blockchain properties. Consequently, different research proposed the adoption of blockchain in Health Care applications. However, few are discussed about incentive methods to attract new users, as well as to motivate the system or application usage by existing end-users. Also, little is discussed about performance during code execution in blockchains. In order to tackle these issues, this work presents the preliminary evaluation of TokenHealth, an application for collaborative health practice monitoring with gamification and token-based incentives. The proposed solution is implemented through smart contracts using Solidity in the Ethereum blockchain. We evaluated the performance of both in Ropsten test network and in a Private instance. The preliminary results show that the execution of smart contracts takes less than a minute for a full cycle of different smart contracts. Also, we present a discussion about costs for using a Private instance and the public Ethereum main network.
In the last few years, different researchers presented proposals for using blockchain in the Internet of Things (IoT) environments. These proposals consider that IoT environments can be benefited from different blockchain characteristics, such as: resilience, distributed processing, integrity and non-repudiation of produced information. However, researchers faced some challenges to use blockchain in IoT, e.g., latency, hardware and energy constraints, and performance requirements. One of the prominent solutions is the appendable-block blockchain, which uses a hierarchical peer-to-peer (p2p) gateway-based architecture. Additionally, current proposals present simplified evaluation scenarios, usually performed in controlled environments, which do not include important network features, for example, latency. Consequently, a model to evaluate a geographically distributed environment, for example, in a situation in which health data have to be collected from different countries in a pandemic situation, can help to understand the behavior and possible flaws of blockchains. In order to evaluate appendable-block blockchains in a realistic scenario, this paper presents an analysis of different consensus algorithms in geographically distributed hosts, in which latency can impact the performance of main operations in a blockchain, such as block and transaction insertion.
Currently, blockchain proposals are being adopted to solve security issues, such as data integrity, resilience, and nonrepudiation. To improve certain aspects, e.g., energy consumption and latency, of traditional blockchains, different architectures, algorithms, and data management methods have been recently proposed. For example, appendable-block blockchain uses a different data structure designed to reduce latency in block and transaction insertion. It is especially applicable in domains such as Internet of Things (IoT), where both latency and energy are key concerns. However, the lack of some features available to other blockchains, such as Smart Contracts, limits the application of this model. To solve this, in this work, we propose the use of Smart Contracts in appendable-block blockchain through a new model called context-based appendable-block blockchain. This model also allows the execution of multiple smart contracts in parallel, featuring high performance in parallel computing scenarios. Furthermore, we present an implementation for the context-based appendable-block blockchain using an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Finally, we execute this implementation in four different testbed. The results demonstrated a performance improvement for parallel processing of smart contracts when using the proposed model.
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