Evaluation of Blockchain Networks’ Scalability Limitations in Low-Powered Internet of Things (IoT) Sensor Networks

Abstract

With the development of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, industries such as healthcare have started using low-powered sensor-based devices. Because IoT devices are typically low-powered, they are susceptible to cyber intrusions. As an emerging information security solution, blockchain technology has considerable potential for protecting low-powered IoT end devices. Blockchain technology provides promising security features such as cryptography, hash functions, time stamps, and a distributed ledger function. Therefore, blockchain technology can be a robust security technology for securing IoT low-powered devices. However, the integration of blockchain and IoT technologies raises a number of research questions. Scalability is one of the most significant. Blockchain’ scalability of low-powered sensor networks needs to be evaluated to identify the practical application of both technologies in low-powered sensor networks. In this paper, we analyse the scalability limitations of three commonly used blockchain algorithms running on low-powered single-board computers communicating in a wireless sensor network. We assess the scalability limitations of three blockchain networks as we increase the number of nodes. Our analysis shows considerable scalability variations between three blockchain networks. The results indicate that some blockchain networks can have over 800 ms network latency and some blockchain networks may use a bandwidth over 1600 Kbps. This work will contribute to developing efficient blockchain-based IoT sensor networks.

Keywords

• blockchain
• low-powered wireless sensor networks
• IoT
• scalability