Smart Contracts Integration between Blockchain and Internet of Things: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

A Smart Contract is self-executable and self-enforceable program code that runs on the top of blockchain to manage complex business logic. It eliminates the need of extrinsic enforcement of legal agreements. Furthermore, it enforces the terms and conditions of an agreement that lies between untrustworthy parties in which the trusted third parties cannot interfere. The cryptography logic used in smart contract enables the blockchain network to provide trust and authority to all parties in transaction. Network decentralization, data immutability and transparency, resiliency and security make blockchain technology more versatile. Recently, it has become a potential quality and capability of IoT to connect uncountable electronic objects or devices at the same time. The most prominent feature of blockchain-based IoT applications is the integration of smart contracts between blockchain and IoT.A brief comparison has been given in the paper that how the smart contracts react on multiple blockchain platforms with respect to scalability, system complexity and consensus protocol factors. Furthermore, the context of Smart contract integration between blockchain and IoT with highlighting the integration opportunities and challenges along with future research directions. Therefore, we have concluded in the current paper that amalgamation of Blockchain with IoT through Smart Contract can provide a strong framework for distributed application and the newly introduced business communities.