Scalable Blockchain-based Architecture for Massive IoT Reconfiguration

Abstract

With billions of IoT devices expected in the next few years, their management is an important issue to be resolved and, while being praised in the past decades, the centralized approach of cloud computing may not be adequate at this massive scale. In this context, the introduction of blockchain technology with a distributed approach has raised a lot of hypes in solving this scalability problem. This paper proposes a blockchain-based architecture design for scalable reconfiguration of massive IoT devices. A REST API event-based publish/subscribe mechanism is used to decouple the IoT devices from the blockchain operations for reducing resource utilization. Moreover, smart contracts, reconfiguration workflows are developed to facilitate the blockchain-based update process. To evaluate the feasibility and performance of the proposed architecture, a proof-of-concept testbed has been developed. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed architecture is capable of providing a scalable solution for delivering on-demand configuration changes with a negligible effect on the resource utilization on IoT devices.