Scalable Blockchain-Based Data Storage in Internet of Things

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) as a ubiquitous networking paradigm has been experiencing serious security and privacy challenges with the increasing data in diversified applications. Fortunately, this will be, to a great extent, alleviated with the emerging blockchain, which is a decentralized digital ledger based on cryptography and offers potential benefits for IoT. Currently, the resource limitations of IoT devices have prevented blockchain from flexibly storing the ever-increasing IoT data. To address this challenge, in this article, we introduce a scalable blockchain paradigm with cloud/fog/edge services and virtualization technology. They also develop an innovative scalable blockchain-based architecture of IoT data storage (SBIT) to tackle its security and scalability concerns through on-chain block validation in IoT, and off-chain data storage in cloud/fog/edge servers. We start by investigating the traditional IoT and identifying the existing issues related to its security and scalability. Then, we explicitly present the details of the scalable blockchain and SBIT, along with a case study. Finally, we summarize the emerging challenges and discuss the future directions for further research on blockchain-based IoT.