Pushing Software-Defined Blockchain Components onto Edge Hosts
This addresses the need for more efficient and tailored blockchain solutions for IoT networks, though it appears incremental by adapting existing concepts to edge computing.
The research tackled the problem of inefficient blockchain implementations for IoT by customizing and encapsulating blockchain features into software-defined components hosted on edge devices, resulting in a system tested using Edison SoC e-miners to provision resources closer to the IoT layer.
With the advent of blockchain technology, some management tasks of IoT networks can be moved from central systems to distributed validation authorities. Cloud-centric blockchain implementations for IoT have shown satisfactory performance. However, some features of blockchain are not necessary for IoT. For instance, a competitive consensus. This research presents the idea of customizing and encapsulating the features of blockchain into software-defined components to host them on edge devices. Thus, blockchain resources can be provisioned by edge devices (e-miners) working together closer to the things layer in a cooperative manner. This research uses Edison SoC as e-miners to test the software-defined blockchain components.