A Survey of IoT Applications in Blockchain Systems: Architecture, Consensus, and Traffic Modeling

Blockchain technology can be extensively applied in diverse services, including online micro-payments, supply chain tracking, digital forensics, health-care record sharing, and insurance payments. Extending the technology to the Internet of things (IoT), we can obtain a verifiable and traceable IoT network. Emerging research in IoT applications exploits blockchain technology to record transaction data, optimize current system performance, or construct next-generation systems, which can provide additional security, automatic transaction management, decentralized platforms, offline-to-online data verification, and so on. In this article, we conduct a systematic survey of the key components of IoT blockchain and examine a number of popular blockchain applications. In particular, we first give an architecture overview of popular IoT-blockchain systems by analyzing their network structures and protocols. Then, we discuss variant consensus protocols for IoT blockchains, and make comparisons among different consensus algorithms. Finally, we analyze the traffic model for P2P and blockchain systems and provide several metrics. We also provide a suitable traffic model for IoT-blockchain systems to illustrate network traffic distribution.