Blockchain and IoT Convergence—A Systematic Survey on Technologies, Protocols and Security

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) as a concept is fascinating and exciting, with an exponential growth just beginning. The IoT global market is expected to grow from 170 billion USD in 2017 to 560 billion USD by 2022. Though many experts have pegged IoT as the next industrial revolution, two of the major challenging aspects of IoT since the early days are having a secure privacy-safe ecosystem encompassing all building blocks of IoT architecture and solve the scalability problem as the number of devices increases. In recent years, Distributed Ledgers have often been referred to as the solution for both privacy and security problems. One form of distributed ledger is the Blockchain system. The aim of this paper consists of reviewing the most recent Blockchain architectures, comparing the most interesting and popular consensus algorithms, and evaluating the convergence between Blockchain and IoT by illustrating some of the main interesting projects in this research field. Furthermore, the paper provides a vision of a disruptive research topic that the authors are investigating: the use of AI algorithms to be applied to IoT devices belonging to a Blockchain architecture. This obviously requires that the devices be provided with adequate computational capacity and that can efficiently optimize their energy consumption.