An IoT Blockchain Architecture Using Oracles and Smart Contracts: the Use-Case of a Food Supply Chain

TL;DR

This paper proposes a lightweight blockchain architecture with a novel consensus mechanism tailored for IoT-enabled supply chains, significantly reducing delays and computational requirements.

Contribution

It introduces LC4IoT, a new lightweight consensus algorithm optimized for IoT supply chains, validated through extensive simulations.

Findings

LC4IoT reduces computational power requirements.

The architecture achieves low latency in IoT supply chain scenarios.

Simulation results confirm efficiency improvements over traditional methods.

Abstract

The blockchain is a distributed technology which allows establishing trust among unreliable users who interact and perform transactions with each other. While blockchain technology has been mainly used for crypto-currency, it has emerged as an enabling technology for establishing trust in the realm of the Internet of Things (IoT). Nevertheless, a naive usage of the blockchain for IoT leads to high delays and extensive computational power. In this paper, we propose a blockchain architecture dedicated to being used in a supply chain which comprises different distributed IoT entities. We propose a lightweight consensus for this architecture, called LC4IoT. The consensus is evaluated through extensive simulations. The results show that the proposed consensus uses low computational power, storage capability and latency.