Blockchains and smart contracts are an emerging, promising technology, that has received considerable attention. We use the blockchain technology, and in particular Ethereum, to implement a large-scale event-based Internet of Things (IoT) control system. We argue that the distributed nature of the “ledger,” as well as, Ethereum's capability of parallel execution of replicated “smart contracts”, provide the sought after automation, generality, flexibility, resilience, and high availability. We design a realistic blockchain-based loT architecture, using existing technologies while by taking into consideration the characteristics and limitations of IoT devices and applications. Furthermore, we leverage blockchain's immutability and Ethereum's support for custom tokens to build a robust and efficient token-based access control mechanism. Our evaluation shows that our solution is viable and offers significant security and usability advantages.
Recently, @cite_5 explored the potential of smart contracts for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. To this end, they developed and evaluated an IoT application for automated, M2M, gasoline purchases that uses Ethereum smart contracts to perform transactions. Our work is also in this direction. Nevertheless, in addition to merely using smart contracts to provide message transfer and payments, our solution supports group communication and access control.
@cite_5
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Blockchain technologies, such as smart contracts, present a unique interface for machine-to-machine communication that provides a secure, append-only record that can be shared without trust and without a central administrator. We study the possibilities and limitations of using smart contracts for machine-to-machine communication by designing, implementing, and evaluating AGasP, an application for automated gasoline purchases. We find that using smart contracts allows us to directly address the challenges of transparency, longevity, and trust in IoT applications. However, real-world applications using smart contracts must address their important trade-offs, such as performance, privacy, and the challenge of ensuring they are written correctly. Despite technological advances, most smart objects in the Internet of Things (IoT) cannot be accessed using technologies designed and developed for interacting with powerful Internet servers. IoT use cases involve devices that not only have limited resources, but also they are not always connected to the Internet and are physically exposed to tampering. In this paper, we describe the design, development, and evaluation of a smart contract-based solution that allows end-users to securely interact with smart devices. Our approach enables access control, Thing authentication, and payments in a fully decentralized setting, taking at the same time into consideration the limitations and constraints imposed by both blockchain technologies and the IoT paradigm. Our prototype implementation is based on existing technologies, i.e., Ethereum smart contracts, which makes it realistic and fundamentally secure. Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications have many applications, such as in smart grid, health monitoring alerting, and intelligent transportation. Due to unique characteristics that are different from the traditional human-to-human communications, numerous design challenges have to be tackled in M2M. A critical issue is that of dealing with the massive access of machine-type communication (MTC) devices while guaranteeing the desired quality of service (QoS). In this paper, we group MTC devices into clusters based on their QoS requirement. By utilizing the time-controlled M2M feature, we formulate the problem of massive access with QoS guarantee as a queuing problem. We derive an overflow probability estimation model by applying a large deviation principle and then propose an online-measurement-based adaptive massive access management for deciding the amount of resources allocated for each cluster. The proposed method bases the decision on the observed traffic workload with no prior knowledge of its statistics. We conduct the simulations in multicluster scenarios with distinct maximum tolerable delay and corresponding acceptable probability in a long-term evolution system. The simulation results show the adaptability of the proposed massive access management regime to the variations in the traffic workload; thus, it is capable of accommodating dynamic propagation conditions and unknown traffic characteristics, particularly in burst-by-burst communications. Machine-to-machine communication, a promising technology for the smart city concept, enables ubiquitous connectivity between one or more autonomous devices without or with minimal human interaction. M2M communication is the key technology to support data transfer among sensors and actuators to facilitate various smart city applications (e.g., smart metering, surveillance and security, infrastructure management, city automation, and eHealth). To support massive numbers of machine type communication (MTC) devices, one of the challenging issues is to provide an efficient way for multiple access in the network and to minimize network overload. In this article, we review the M2M communication techniques in Long Term Evolution- Advanced cellular networks and outline the major research issues. Also, we review the different random access overload control mechanisms to avoid congestion caused by random channel access of MTC devices. To this end, we propose a reinforcement learning-based eNB selection algorithm that allows the MTC devices to choose the eNBs (or base stations) to transmit packets in a self-organizing fashion.