Blockchain Paradigm and Internet of Things

Blockchain (BC) represents a distributed ledger technology that has been utilized for providing security and privacy in distributed networks. This makes it applicable to the distributed nature of IoT, which still suffers from privacy and security vulnerabilities. However, the core BC technology is computationally expensive and commonly involves high bandwidth overhead and delays not suitable for IoT related scenarios. In order to foster the synergy between BC and IoT, recent research advancements have specifically focused on developing novel BC approaches that are tailored to the requirements and needs of the specific IoT use cases. The paper elaborates the BC–IoT related issues and provides a comprehensive survey of the current literature and relevant initiated deployments. The paper also identifies the key research and development challenges and discusses the possible aspects for future research.