The Difficulties of Blockchain and IoT Integration
The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the number of devices connected to the internet, collecting and sharing information. And we actually see many IoT devices in our everyday life, from smart home security systems to smart thermostats.
While blockchain technology has initially been linked to financial services, it has rapidly evolved since then. And its integration with IoT has become an area of interest. In fact, blockchain plays a significant role in how IoT devices directly communicate with each other. And while this partnership is indeed making an impact in the industry, it is not without difficulties.
Weak Data Encryption
Data encryption is a crucial part of many technological systems. However, the ability of IoT devices to encrypt data is much weaker than that of blockchain.
As a way to remedy this and increase IoT encrypting security, quantum physics-based data is used to provide entropy encryption. The difference between this and data based on classical physics is that the former is random. By applying the mechanisms of quantum random number generation, you can improve IoT network encryption.
Risk of Overloading Smart Contracts
There is a risk of overloading smart contracts with IoT devices since smart contracts may require access to a few data sources. They may need a significant amount of computing power which IoT may not be able to accommodate.
Additionally, smart contracts typically require third-party data sources for contract completion. But without solid security, authentication, and trust in the IoT environment, there is a possibility that the work of smart contracts may be hacked.
Scaling Difficulties
As IoT networks continue to evolve rapidly, there is a need to process more data, transactions, and smart devices. But since immediate data transferring is necessary for connecting IoT elements, blockchains with poor working speed may have some difficulties with scaling.
Ideally, the architecture of a blockchain should provide security for simple network nodes and be able to process thousands of transactions per second. One way to achieve this is through parallel computing.
Parallel computing increases transaction effectiveness by processing a few transactions at a time. And when one chain gets too complicated, you can control the traffic by dividing it into parallel chains. This allows for better data collection and analysis in the IoT when large amounts of data analysis are required.
Limited Resources
Another problem with the IoT infrastructure is that it has limited memory availability and computing abilities. You see, blockchain technology would typically need a large amount of memory to store records.
Currently, people are trying to find a solution to this problem. So far, IBM has gotten the closest by inventing the concept of versatile and regional blockchains. Essentially, the network nodes will be divided into simple p2p nodes, standard p2p nodes, and p2p exchangers.
The simple p2p nodes will be used to store the blockchain address and balance. On the other hand, the standard p2p nodes will keep recent transactions and simple nodes. And lastly, the p2p exchangers will perform the data analysis by replicating the complete blockchain.
Final Thoughts
The integration of blockchain technology with IoT systems has become an area of interest in the field, as blockchains can help communication between IoT devices. However, the implementation of blockchain in IoT can face challenges, such as weak encryption, risk of overloading smart contracts, scalability, and limited resources. But now that we have become aware of these difficulties, people are studying them more and looking for solutions.
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