A Comprehensive Study of State-of-the-Art App- lications and Challenges in IoT, and Blockchain Technologies for Industry 4.0

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of smart and self-configuring devices that exchange data by interacting with the environment to make decisions without human intervention. Endowed to sense surrounding events, these physical objects generate large amounts of real-time data that need an acceptable architecture with better security to process and convert it into meaningful information. Implementation of blockchain in IoT offers a secure, transparent and efficient mechanism to store and manage data generated by connected IoT devices. Even though the integration of blockchain with IoT is pretty recent, there are at present a huge number of applications that include smart healthcare, smart homes, e-government, automotive industry, smart education, precision agriculture etc. However, there are several challenges encountered in Blockchain-IoT integration which include anonymity, standardization, interoperability, heterogeneity, data privacy, smart contracts, legal issues, transparency, storage capacity and scalability, security, etc. This chapter presents the current state-of-the-art Blockchain-IoT integration in order to examine how blockchain could possibly improve the IoT ecosystem catered towards Industry 4.0. This chapter investigates the various application domains of Blockchain-IoT integration. It also discusses the main challenges faced in the adoption of blockchain in IoT environments for I4.0

Keywords: Blockchain technology, Internet of things, Industry 4.0, Smart home, Smart education.