Internet of Things and Blockchain technologies have been dominating their respective research domains for some time. IoT offers automation at the finest level in different fields, while Blockchain provides secure transaction processing for asset exchanges. The capability of IoT devices to generate transactions prompts their integration with Blockchain as the next logical step. The biggest challenges in this integration are the scalability of ledger and rate of transaction execution in Blockchain. On one hand, due to their large numbers, IoT devices will generate transactions at a rate which current block chain solutions cannot handle. On the other hand, implementing Blockchain peers onto IoT devices is impossible due to resource constraints. This prohibits direct integration of both technologies in their current state. In this article, we propose a solution to address these challenges by using a local peer network to bridge the gap. It restricts the number of transactions which enters the global Blockchain by implementing a scalable local ledger, without compromising on the peer validation of transactions at local and global level. The testbed evaluations show significant reduction in the block weight and ledger size on global peers. The solution also indirectly improves the transaction processing rate of all peers due to load distribution.

Efficient and smart business processes are heavily dependent on the Internet of Things (IoT) networks, where end-to-end optimization is critical to the success of the whole ecosystem. These systems, including industrial, healthcare, and others, are large scale complex networks of heterogeneous devices. This introduces many security and access control challenges. Blockchain has emerged as an effective solution for addressing several such challenges. However, the basic algorithms used in the business blockchain are not feasible for large scale IoT systems. To make them scalable for IoT, the complex consensus-based security has to be downgraded. In this article, we propose a novel lightweight proof of block and trade (PoBT) consensus algorithm for IoT blockchain and its integration framework. This solution allows the validation of trades as well as blocks with reduced computation time. Also, we present a ledger distribution mechanism to decrease the memory requirements of IoT nodes. The analysis and evaluation of security aspects, computation time, memory, and bandwidth requirements show significant improvement in the performance of the overall system.

Internet of Things (IoT) and Network Softwarization are fast becoming core technologies of information systems and network management for the next-generation Internet. The deployment and applications of IoT range from smart cities to urban computing and from ubiquitous healthcare to tactile Internet. For this reason, the physical infrastructure of heterogeneous network systems has become more complicated and thus requires efficient and dynamic solutions for management, configuration, and flow scheduling. Network softwarization in the form of Software Defined Networks and Network Function Virtualization has been extensively researched for IoT in the recent past. In this article, we present a systematic and comprehensive review of virtualization techniques explicitly designed for IoT networks. We have classified the literature into software-defined networks designed for IoT, function virtualization for IoT networks, and software-defined IoT networks. These categories are further divided into works that present architectural, security, and management solutions. Besides, the article highlights several short-term and long-term research challenges and open issues related to the adoption of software-defined Internet of Things.

E-health systems have witnessed widespread usage in the last few years, mainly due to advancements in health monitoring hardware and the availability of remote diagnostic services. Given the numerous benefits, there are two main challenges: management of the e-health ecosystem and security and privacy of sensitive data. The former results from nonunified, redundant, and often replicated information across numerous independent e-health service providers. While the later stems from sensitive information stored in centralized systems that can be compromised. Blockchain has emerged as a promising technology, which can be used to secure access and privacy of data and provide an umbrella management solution to large-scale distributed and decentralized enterprise systems. In this article, we present a unified system for migrating independent conventional e-health systems to a single blockchain-based ecosystem. More specifically, we address the issues of difference in data structures for conventional relational databases and blockchain file databases. The solution describes the conversion process and synchronization of information in a unified system for large-scale e-health data. The implementation and analysis show that significant improvements in data storage, access control, and seamless migration can be achieved.