Optimal Deployment Mechanism of Blockchain in Resource-Constrained IoT Systems

The recently emerging blockchain technology provides a promising tool to enable endogenous security in Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems. However, when applying the legacy blockchain technology to the existing IoT systems, some technical bottlenecks due to resource constraints, such as storage resource, should be carefully addressed. In this article, we propose an optimal blockchain deployment mechanism for wireless IoT systems, where IoT devices have limited resources and the wireless links connection IoT devices are vulnerable, to improve the storage efficiency of massive blockchain data and realize the organic integration of blockchain technology and the communication process. We propose to maintain a complete blockchain by a set of proximity IoT nodes in a collaborative way on the premise of ensuring that each node can check every transaction. Through dynamically adjusting optimal block assignment, the tradeoff between the length of the blockchain to be stored and the security level provided can be well made. Moreover, a chaotic-based genetic algorithm is developed to obtain the near-optimal block assignment solution efficiently. Simulation results show that our proposed blockchain-based mechanism can effectively address the security issue in wireless IoT systems.