Enabling a Blockchain-Based IoT Edge

Within many industry verticals, the Internet of Things (IoT) provides the means to collect and analyze crucial data, for optimizing systems performance. The technical evolution of the IoT is shifting its computational capabilities away from centralized cloud platforms to a decentralized IoT edge. The IoT edge faces challenges in providing fully decentralized security mechanisms, as well as built-in guarantees for user-data privacy. In recent years, blockchain has been viewed as a potential fabric for a secure, decentralized IoT edge, due to its inherent features of fault tolerance, transparency and enforcement of service level agreements through smart contracts. Despite their virtues, blockchains have their fair share of challenges in the way of being integrated into the IoT. In this article, we discuss these challenges, as well as candidate solutions for integrating blockchains into the IoT edge.