Blockchain for IoT: Applications and Challenges

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of physical devices and other objects embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity, which enables these objects to collect and exchange data. It is expected that 25 billion objects will be connected to the Internet by 2025 through IoT-based solutions, which will generate a huge amount of data, around 4.4 trillion gigabytes, by 2025. The IoT-connected objects will interact with their delayed environments to sense, collect, and forward the measured data. It is very important to ensure IoT solutions are deployed in trusted distributed environments to provide features such as seamless authentication, data privacy, security, robustness against attacks, easy deployment, and self-maintenance. Blockchain is an emerging technology that will help to provide confidence in implementing the aforementioned characteristics for any IoT-based solution. In this talk, I will address the evolution of IoT in different fields, followed by real examples that present data growth. Then, I will present the connection between IoT & Blockchain and the necessary components to develop an efficient framework. Challenges and future directions will be presented and discussed.