A Study on the Adoption of Blockchain for IoT Devices in Supply Chain

The integration of blockchain and IoT enables promising solutions in decentralized environments in contrast with centralized systems. The blockchain brings forth features such as fault tolerance, security, and transparency of the data in IoT devices. As there is requirement of consensus among the network nodes to agree on a single-state-of-ledger, nonetheless, the extensive computational requirement for the consensus protocol becomes a limitation in resource-constrained IoT devices with limited battery, computation, and communication capabilities. This study proposes an empirical approach on the adoption of blockchain in a supply chain environment. Furthermore, a modified version of the Raft consensus protocol is proposed for use in supply-chain environment on the permissioned blockchain Hyperledger. In Raft consensus protocol, each transaction is directed to the leader node that transmits it to the follower nodes, making the leader node the bottleneck thus inhibiting the scalability and throughput of the system. This also results in high latency for the network. The modified RAFT consensus protocol (mRAFT) is based on the idea of utilizing the idle follower nodes in disseminating the vote requests and log replication messages. A detailed empirical evaluation of the solution built on Hyperledger Caliper is performed to demonstrate the applicability of the system. The improved workload division on the peers boosts the throughput and latency of the system in ordering service that enhances the overall efficiency of the system.

Automated summary

The integration of blockchain and IoT in decentralized environments offers promising solutions, but the computational requirements of consensus protocols limit their application in resource-constrained IoT devices. This study proposes an empirical approach for blockchain adoption in the supply chain and introduces a modified Raft consensus protocol for permissioned blockchain Hyperledger.