Hybrid-IoT: Hybrid Blockchain Architecture for Internet of Things - PoW Sub-blockchains

TL;DR

Hybrid-IoT introduces a novel hybrid blockchain architecture for IoT, combining PoW sub-blockchains with BFT inter-connection frameworks to enhance decentralization, security, and support for time-critical applications.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new hybrid blockchain architecture for IoT, integrating PoW sub-blockchains with BFT frameworks, and provides guidelines for their formation along with performance and security evaluations.

Findings

PoW sub-blockchains can be effectively formed based on specific guidelines.

The hybrid architecture improves security and decentralization in IoT systems.

Performance evaluation demonstrates the approach's viability.

Abstract

From its early days the Internet of Things (IoT) has evolved into a decentralized system of cooperating smart objects with the requirement, among others, of achieving distributed consensus. Yet, current IoT platform solutions are centralized cloud based computing infrastructures, manifesting a number of significant disadvantages, such as, among others, high cloud server maintenance costs, weakness for supporting time-critical IoT applications, security and trust issues. Enabling blockchain technology into IoT can help to achieve a proper distributed consensus based IoT system that overcomes those disadvantages. While this is an ideal match, it is still a challenging endeavor. In this paper we take a first step towards that goal by designing Hybrid-IoT, a hybrid blockchain architecture for IoT. In Hybrid-IoT, subgroups of IoT devices form PoW blockchains, referred to as PoW sub-blockchains. Then, the connection among the PoW sub-blockchains employs a BFT inter-connector framework, such as Polkadot or Cosmos. In this paper we focus on the PoW sub-blockchains formation, guided by a set of guidelines based on a set of dimensions, metrics and bounds. In order to prove the validity of the approach we carry a performance and security evaluation.