A blockchain architecture for IoT

In IBM’s recent IEEE International Blockchain Conference paper “Hybrid-IoT: Hybrid Blockchain Architecture for Internet of Things (IoT) – PoW Sub-blockchains” it explains the first phase of development for an end-to-end, decentralised framework to autonomously manage the orchestration of geographically distributed IoT networks. It achieves this through the combination of analytics, well-established blockchain community-based open source modules and a novel code base written by the team. In essence, we adapted the Bitcoin Proof of Work- PoW consensus protocol and coded analytics that optimally cluster the IoT devices into separate blockchains, or sub-blockchains.

Success in an IoT application typically requires the connected, concerted operation and management of a large number of distributed and loosely coupled smart devices that identify and trust each other. While the IoT promises that this integration should ideally map to a decentralized hardware and software platform, current solutions are mostly based on centralized infrastructures. The disadvantages of a centralized infrastructure are, among others: high maintenance costs; low interoperability due to restricted data aggregation with other centralized infrastructures; and single points of failure (SPOF) against security threats.

Decentralization of an IoT infrastructure brings advantages including reduction of the amount of data transferred to the cloud for processing and analysis, improvements in security and privacy of the managed data, and more concerted and autonomous operations. For example, in smart home environments, IoT devices autonomously exchange and process data; assure data security, operations accountability, device identification; and collectively and autonomously execute smart homes operations. Ensuring the veracity of these operations means achieving distributed consensus across IoT devices.

Read the full story at https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2018/10/blockchain-internet-of-things/

SOURCE: IBM