Internet of things IoT is playing a remarkable role in the advancement of many fields such as healthcare, smart grids, supply chain management, etc. It also eases people’s daily lives and enhances their interaction with each other as well as with their surroundings and the environment in a broader scope. IoT performs this role utilizing devices and sensors of different shapes and sizes ranging from small embedded sensors and wearable devices all the way to automated systems. However, IoT networks are growing in size, complexity, and number of connected devices. As a result, many challenges and problems arise such as security, authenticity, reliability, and scalability. Based on that and taking into account the anticipated evolution of the IoT, it is extremely vital not only to maintain but to increase confidence in and reliance on IoT systems by tackling the aforementioned issues. The emergence of blockchain opened the door to solve some challenges related to IoT networks. Blockchain characteristics such as security, transparency, reliability, and traceability make it the perfect candidate to improve IoT systems, solve their problems, and support their future expansion. This paper demonstrates the major challenges facing IoT systems and blockchain’s proposed role in solving them. It also evaluates the position of current researches in the field of merging blockchain with IoT networks and the latest implementation stages. Additionally, it discusses the issues related to the IoT-blockchain integration itself. Finally, this research proposes an architectural design to integrate IoT with blockchain in two layers using dew and cloudlet computing. Our aim is to benefit from blockchain features and services to guarantee a decentralized data storage and processing and address security and anonymity challenges and achieve transparency and efficient authentication service.

The remarkable increase in the number of interconnected smart devices in today’s Internet of things networks introduces more challenges related to security, trust, and centralization, which require more effective solutions. Fortunately, blockchain technology has recently emerged as a potential rescuer for IoT-based solutions due to its decentralization and enhanced security features. It is usual for smart contracts to arise in handling and processing the generated data when IoT devices are combined with blockchain. However, blockchain and smart contracts need to interact with input data of the same level of trust to guarantee correct applications execution. This implies using oracles to provide trust compatibility between inserted information collected from IoT devices and blockchain and smart contracts. Therefore, this study adopts a methodology that was shaped based on current literature and design and experiments to provide a full narrative of the process of combining two of the most intriguing systems in today’s world of technology, namely, blockchain and IoT including a very important part of the comprehensive system, viz. blockchain oracle. Moreover, it was found that the literature lacks a complete view of the IoT-blockchain integration process that covers all its important and related aspects. Therefore, this work is an attempt to fill the gap in literature and contribute to the body of knowledge by surveying the literature about existing IoT-blockchain architectures and shed light on the role of blockchain in addressing IoT issues while demonstrating the concept of oracles as well as their functions in addition to the main operating blockchain oracles. Additionally, this work illustrates a CO ₂ measuring use case where a smart contract is developed and tested as part of two proposed oracle-based designs. The obtained results demonstrate a full picture of a practical integrated IoT-blockchain system architecture.

With the increasing investments in on-the-move electric vehicle (EV) charging solutions and wireless charging lanes (WCLs), coordination of the energy requirements of mobile EVs becomes essential to ensure load balancing while maximizing demand coverage. This necessitates the development of online and mobility-aware algorithms for assigning EV-to-charging lanes. In this work, a decentralized, blockchain-based EV assignment and energy allocation system is presented. The objective of system is to coordinate the charging requirements of mobile EVs among the available WCLs within a network of EV chargers in an Internet of Electric Vehicles (IoEVs). This blockchain-based system offers higher security, transparency and immutability over traditional rule-based coordination schemes. It also offers an integrated end-to-end framework that handles user registration, authentication, lane activation and energy reporting. This is in addition to its main functionality of establishing a real-time and load-balanced EV-to-WCL assignment process that addresses the EV energy requirements within constraints of traveling distance and remaining EV energy. The proposed system is tested on the Ethereum blockchain and its security and transparency are both validated accordingly.

The financial data supply chain is vital to the economy, especially for banks. It affects their customer service level, therefore, it is crucial to manage the scheduling of the financial data supply chain to elevate the efficiency of banking sectors’ performance. The primary tool used in the data supply chain is data batch processing which requires efficient scheduling. This work investigates the problem of scheduling the processing of tasks with non-identical sizes and different priorities on a set of parallel processors. An iterative dynamic scheduling algorithm (DCSDBP) was developed to address the data batching process. The objective is to minimize different cost types while satisfying constraints such as resources availability, customer service level, and tasks dependency relation. The algorithm proved its effectiveness by allocating tasks with higher priority and weight while taking into consideration customers’ Service Level Agreement, time, and different types of costs, which led to a lower total cost of the batching process. The developed algorithm proved effective by testing it on an illustrative network. Also, a sensitivity analysis is conducted by varying the model parameters for networks with different sizes and complexities to study their impact on the total cost and the problem under study.

The world has faced pandemics throughout its history. The most recent, COVID-19, took lives and disrupted healthcare and economies. COVID-19 vaccine programs were launched worldwide; however, the record time in which vaccines were developed raises questions about side effects and their severity. Also, as vaccines are delicate medical products, their cold supply chain must be continuously tracked and monitored to ensure their efficacy. Moreover, vaccine supply chain management is complex and requires trained staff to handle its different activities. As such, it is important to connect beneficiaries’ symptoms and registration systems with the vaccine supply chain to enable healthcare authorities to investigate whether observed side effects may be linked to cold chain handling conditions or production factors. Consequently, the need arises for a system that manages trained personnel certificate generation, which could also be used as a verification tool for employing the right experts for the right job. Therefore, our study developed a blockchain platform that integrates individuals’ registration and side effect data with vaccine cold supply chain information. The developed platform also includes a certification system for cold supply chain personnel training to support authenticated certificate generation and role assignment management. Blockchain was selected due to its features of security, decentralization, traceability, and trust. The key contributions of this work lie in providing a digital collaborative management and data tracing platform for vaccine side effects that are linked to beneficiaries’ registration and cold supply chain data to enable healthcare authorities to investigate whether any observed side effects may be linked to cold chain handling conditions or production factors while managing the issuance of certificates for trained cold supply chain personnel and controlling their employment in the correct chain(s). Our platform creates training certificate IDs without a central entity to regulate certificate generation and uses the created certificate information to control the employment of personnel with the appropriate training in the right chain to perform the right role. Our platform identified personnel employed in any chain where violations were recorded and side effects were subsequently reported, and presents their training and employment data, providing the interconnected data record necessary for accountability. The platform was tested successfully, producing the desired outcome of secure, traceable, and transparent vaccine data sharing, linking, and verification.