BlockEdge: Blockchain-Edge Framework for Industrial IoT Networks

Abstract

Industry 4.0 encompasses a promise of a new industrial revolution in terms of providing secure, intelligent, autonomous and self-adaptive industrial IoT (IIoT) networks. Key industrial applications and systems will be significantly more complex due to the involvement of the vast number of different devices and diverse nature of various stakeholders and service providers. These complex industrial processes, services and applications also have strict requirements in terms of performance-latency in particular-and resource-efficiency, together with high standards for security and trust. In this context, Blockchain and Edge Computing emerge as prominent technologies to address the mentioned essential requirements and to further strengthen the rise of the new era of digitization. The Edge computing paradigm ensures low latency services for IIoT applications while optimizing the network usage, whereas Blockchain provides a decentralized way for ensuring data integrity, trust and security. In this paper, we propose a 'BlockEdge' framework that combines these two enabling technologies to address some of the critical issues faced by the current IIoT networks. We verify the feasibility of our approach by evaluating the performance and resource-efficiency of BlockEdge in terms of latency, power consumption and network usage, through simulations against non-Blockchain solution.

Health-BlockEdge: Blockchain-Edge Framework for Reliable Low-Latency Digital Healthcare Applications

“…Furthermore, in one of our previous works [ 47 ], we exploited the benefit of local tier processing, proposed a three-tier IoT edge model, and analyzed the performance of the network. In [ 53 ], we extended the work performed in [ 47 ] by integrating the blockchain technology in the three-tier IoT edge models and evaluated the performance with and without the addition of the blockchain. However, in this paper, we extended our previous research [ 53 ] for the delay-critical healthcare use case and measured a number of key parameters such as network latency, power consumption, network usage, total cost, and number of operations executed in order to evaluate the overall performance of our proposed framework.…”

Fog computing security and privacy for the Internet of Thing applications: State‐of‐the‐art

“…Due to the distribution of Fog nodes and its closeness to IoT devices, centralized control system like what we have in the Cloud is not possible. Therefore, new innovative techniques and solutions are required to enhance IoT users and data privacy in the Fog environment 24,123,124 such as using the blockchain technology 26,27,125‐128 . This section discusses the recommendations and future opportunities to mitigate this issue.…”

“…Therefore, new innovative techniques and solutions are required to enhance IoT users and data privacy in the Fog environment 24,123,124 such as using the blockchain technology. 26,27,[125][126][127][128] This section discusses the recommendations and future opportunities to mitigate this issue.…”

“…Fog computing was introduced to deal with most of the issues of Cloud computing. It is close to IoT devices, which helps these devices in many issues such as long latency, communication, storage, control, services, and computations 27 . Fog nodes are distributed which helps in solving the issue of mobility and scalability as well as smooth interruptions in the bandwidth of the network.…”

“…It is close to IoT devices, which helps these devices in many issues such as long latency, communication, storage, control, services, and computations. 27 Fog nodes are distributed which helps in solving the issue of mobility and scalability as well as smooth interruptions in the bandwidth of the network. In short, Fog computing can provide many benefits including saving of bandwidth, support of mobility, low latency, Heterogeneity, geographical distribution, and low energy consumption.…”