Integration of blockchain and Internet of Things: challenges and solutions

Blockchain-based Internet of Things (BIoT) is an emerging paradigm of Internet of Things (IoT) which utilizes the blockchain technology to provide security services to the IoT applications. In essence, the blockchain built-in security mechanism can provide services such as availability, authentication, authorization, confidentiality, and integrity to the IoT applications. While most of the IoT devices are inherently resource-constrained in terms of computational power and storage capacity, the downside for blockchain is a requirement of massive amount of energy and computational resources for its operation, which poses challenges to the realization of BIoT. This paper strives to explore the challenges associated with the integration of blockchain and IoT and review their solutions. First, a brief introduction of blockchain technology is presented, followed by characterization of blockchain-based IoT applications as per their heterogeneous traffic demand and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Next, challenges that limit the design, development, and deployment of BIoT applications are explained in detail such as energy efficiency, privacy, throughput, latency, fork problem, security, legal issues, smart contracts, storage, and network broadcast mechanism and their proposed solutions are discussed. Finally, future research directions of blockchain and IoT integration are indicated. This investigation will benefit the researchers and developers to identify and solve blockchain and IoT integration challenges in order to realize efficient BIoT applications.