Improving data integrity and fault tolerance in IoT networks with Blockchain: on the search for suitable consensus mechanisms

Abstract

IoT devices have grown rapidly over the past few years. IoT devices are mostly connected to a central server that stores the data and handles end-to-end communication. Due to the increase of IoT devices, the latency with the server increases. Furthermore, when using a central server the data is at risk of being deleted or tampered with. To mitigate these issues blockchain could be integrated with the IoT devices to create a decentralized framework. This paper discusses how IoT integrated with blockchain can solve the problems with data integrity and fault tolerance in current IoT frameworks. Furthermore, different consensus mechanisms are compared and improvements are given to make the mechanisms suitable for IoT devices. The paper concludes by stating that G-PBFT, BFT-SMaRt and Tangle/Jointgraph are the most suitable consensus mechanisms for IoT devices with regard to computational power, throughput, latency and Byzantine fault tolerance. Moreover, two improvements with regard to reducing the latency and increasing the trust in G-PBFT are given.