DLIT: A Scalable Distributed Ledger for IoT Data

Abstract

The integration of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Blockchain (BC) for strong trust and decentralization shows potentials in use cases, such as supply chain tracing, smart cities, and health care. As a great number of IoT devices interacting in such cases, it is crucial to provide scalable and secure mechanisms for IoT data persistence within BCs. In this regard, sharding mechanisms have been employed to enhance the scalability of BCs. However, disconnections and delays of a BC’s distributed network can cause concerns for inter-shard and inter-miner synchronizations, eventually preventing the BC from reaching a high throughput. Thus, this work develops an IoT-oriented permissioned BC, which covers via a scalable Distributed Ledger (DL) a novel sharding mechanism for unstable distributed networks. Therefore, DLIT (Distributed Ledger for IoT Data) offers a novel two-layered transaction distribution, validation, and inter-shard synchronization, combined with authentication and verification mechanisms in support of a viable security level.