IIT Jodhpur: Researchers make blockchain protocol more efficient for IoT applications

NEW DELHI: Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur (IIT Jodhpur) have developed an improvised version of blockchain technology that is both energy and time-efficient, allowing its application for making secure communication in IoT networks.

The results of the research have been published in a prestigious international journal "IEEE Transactions" on Computational Social Systems. According to the team, Internet of things (IoT) is a new paradigm that will revolutionise the way we live. With zillions of smart devices talking to each other through embedded sensors, software and technologies, the IoT platform will enable integration of data for seamless functioning of smart cities, smart homes, smart industries, smart transportation etc.

As a plethora of sensitive data will be collected and passed through this platform, IoT security is a major concern for both users and providers, it said. To make the IoT platforms more secure, researchers suggest the use of blockchain technology to run the IoT platforms. Blockchain is a technology that is being employed as a means for secure digital transactions of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and many more.

However, time delays and energy efficiency are major drawbacks of currently used blockchain protocols, limiting its use for IoT platforms. "Blockchain is one of the technologies that can resolve the security issues of the IoT networks. It is a scalable, distributed, transparent, and tamper-proof ledger that keeps uniform records of information at varying locations and can deal with IoT networks’ information security affairs.

Decentralization, integrity, and anonymity are the prominent characteristics of blockchain that increase IoT applications’ integrity and improve IoT security," said Debasis Das, assistant professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Jodhpur . Das has now come up with a blockchain protocol that is energy-efficient and can be integrated with lightweight IoT devices.

"The blockchain protocol devised by the research team is an improvised version of an existing blockchain protocol-Bitcoin-NG. While Bitcoin-NG protocol is a significant improvement over the currently used Bitcoin protocol in terms of time efficiency, however, it requires high computational power and is energy-intensive. "Proposed Improvised Bitcoin-NG is applied to solve a variety of complex tasks and shows significant results without much human intervention.

Given Blockchain-based IoT systems will add a boom in the advancement of IoT technology and explore the suitability and sustainability of improvised Bitcoin-NG for various application areas," Das added.

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