3C Tecnología. Glosas de innovación aplicadas a la pyme. ISSN: 2254 – 4143 Edición Especial Special Issue Mayo 2021

BLOCKCHAIN ENABLED IOTS TOWARDS ACHIEVING

THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS

Nasser Hassan Abosaq

Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Engineering Department.

Yanbu University College, Yanbu Industrial City, (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia).

E-mail: abosaqn@rcyci.edu.sa

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-00031354-3170

Recepción:

14/12/2020

Aceptación:

03/03/2021

Publicación:

07/05/2021

Citación sugerida:

Abosaq, N. H. (2021). Blockchain enabled IoTs towards achieving the Sustainable Development

Goals. 3C Tecnología. Glosas de innovación aplicadas a la pyme, Edición Especial, (mayo 2021), 23-33. https://

doi.org/10.17993/3ctecno.2021.specialissue7.23-33

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3C Tecnología. Glosas de innovación aplicadas a la pyme. ISSN: 2254 – 4143 Edición Especial Special Issue Mayo 2021

ABSTRACT

The Blockchain enabled Internet of Things (IoTs) has emerged as an impactful research

domain in recent years because of its focused global interest owing to the United Nations’

commitment to achieve 17 Sustainable Development Goals by the year 2030. The Blockchain

enabled IoTs has also received considerable attention from industry and academia due to

its vast ranged potential applications in many explored elds. The Blockchain enabled IoTs

technology has crossed the boundaries of cryptocurrency infrastructure and has become

an integrated and distributed Systems of Systems (SoS) networked technology. It is because

of a paradigm shift from centralized to the devolved and from static to dynamic networks

of networks that this technology has received a wide enthusiasm and attention from

researchers. This research is focused on challenges and opportunities of Blockchain enabled

IoTs on cloud infrastructure, 5G/6G wireless systems and its computing issues for achieving

United Nations’ sustainable development goals by 2030 worldwide. As a use case scenario,

we highlight the latest advancements in blockchain enabled IoTs, its various potential

applications, future research directions and its infrastructure available in the research

readings. Investigation into the important factors considered as technical challenges to the

socio-economic development with respect to achieving sustainable development goals are

also reviewed. Numerous case studies on Blockchain enabled IoTs in various application

areas of the interest falling in SDGs domain have been performed the interpretive case

study approach is selected to gather the data and its results, and a protocol is dened to

design the structure.

KEYWORDS

Blockchain, IoT, 5G, 6G, Wireless technology, Sustainable development goals.

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1. INTRODUCTION

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set forth by United Nations in 2016 were

succeeded by the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targeted to be achieved by the

year 2030 (United Nations, n.d. b). The SDGs are the targets for global wellness by easing

the human lives through zero hunger, equitable quality education, sound environment,

productive employment, economic growth through industrialization, green energy, global

partnership, research and innovation on underwater resources, technology and many more.

Emergence of 5G/6G universal telecommunication systems, 3D printing, blockchain,

unmanned vehicles, drones as means of smart transportation and innovations in Articial

Intelligence (AI), Cloud computing, big data and data analytics are all set to aid in the

UN’s eorts for achieving SDGs by the year 2030. The world has entered a new era of

technological development through fourth industrial revolution (4IR) of digital divide

with many devastating challenges like COVID 19, environmental degradation, global

warming, growing urbanization and natural disasters; all severely need multi-stakeholder

partnerships among North-South, South-South and triangular regional and international

digital connectivity. For coping with all these challenging global circumstances, nations

are striving for innovative ideas and the Blockchain enabled IoTs is one of the promising

technologies for designing robust digital networking responsible for connecting the humans,

machines, and devices.

Internet of Things (IoTs) has integrated physical industrial operations with cyberspace

technology in all its applications ranging from manufacturing to logistics to supply chain

management. This has decentralized and diversied many industrial processes and systems

and thus has created numerous process ow issues of interoperability of systems and

devices, scalability, security, and privacy, trusted reliance and the most important one is

the complex networking topologies due to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). The

emergence of blockchain technology as a distributed system and its marriage with IoTs as

a Service-oriented-Architecture have posed a sigh of relief for smooth industrial workow

of complex processes towards the successful business plans (Dorri et al., 2016). Because of

the inherited property of being a comparatively secure and trusted system due to chained

blocks data structures, immutability, and irrevocability, blockchain technology has received

a sense of trustworthiness and condentiality to execute guaranteed operations by all its

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potential end users. Hence adopting the blockchain technology for secure IoT applications

has gained wide acceptance both in industry and researching academia (Ahmad & Salah,

2018).

This research is focused on challenges and opportunities of Blockchain enabled IoTs

on many industrial applications, cloud infrastructure and 5G/6G wireless systems for

achieving United Nations’ sustainable development goals by 2030 worldwide. As a use

case scenario, we highlight the latest advancements in blockchain enabled IoTs, its various

potential applications and future research directions. Investigation into the important

factors considered as technical challenges to the socio-economic development with respect

to achieving sustainable development goals are also reviewed.

2. CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES OF BLOCKCHAIN

ENABLED IOTS

In Blockchain enabled IoTs security is realized as one of the main concerns by the

researchers whereas the industrialized IoTs lack sucient computing resources to tackle

crypto-materialized protocols. There is an acute lack of common platform to deal with

resource constrained low memory IoTs’ ability to handle big data analytics challenge.

Consequently, modications in DDoS, smart contracts (Christidis & Devetsikiotis, 2016),

Service oriented layered Architecture, edge-IoT system, modication in authentication

procedures to secure from external threats, multi-layered decentralization both in IoTs

and Blockchain and many other enabling approaches have been proposed to overcome the

challenges of blockchain-IoT nexus (Ahmad & Salah, 2018).

However, the opportunities in this era outscore the present challenges. While perceiving

the potential of technology in the context of achieving UN’s sustainable development goals

by 2030, the enormous opportunities in blockchain enabled IoTs further drag us towards

researching on multi-stakeholder economic growth, Machine-to-Machine networking, smart

cities’ automated transportation systems, innovative startups, biomedical and healthcare

applications’ sensors, cybersecurity, and supply chain management of all types and, last but

not the least. the information and communication technologies.

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3C Tecnología. Glosas de innovación aplicadas a la pyme. ISSN: 2254 – 4143 Edición Especial Special Issue Mayo 2021

2.1. ARCHITECTURAL REQUIREMENT OF BLOCKCHAIN-IOT

Blockchain enabled IoT can be realized as an information system with a set of parameters to

form a physical solution of any targeted prerequisites based upon axiomatic design theory.

Such an axiomatic design system is an interdependent and interconnected mechanism of

three entities, i.e., the customer’s domain requirements (CRs), the functional requirements

(FRs) and the physical solutions (PSs) as shown in Graphic 1 (Cochran et al., 2016). The

axiomatic design theory is based upon mutual agreements that what customers desire to

receive (FRs) is mapped to how those are produced (PSs). Hence there is a strong level of

satisfaction between the involved parties as far as physical solutions are concerned.

Graphic 1. ADT for complex system design.

Source: (Cochran et al., 2016).

The IoT exhibits a non-static, dynamically oriented open environment where continuously

changing services are involved requiring multi-vendor Quality of Service (QoS) responses

to manage big data and its transmission load. Secondly the blockchain technology

encompasses its inherent potential to deal with security threats due to Service oriented

architecture of IoT as shown in Graphic 2. Other security threats like at Physical Layer

(Interference, Insecure conguration, Spoong and Physical Security), Network Layer

Security (Like Resource Depletion, Identity and Authentication and Protocols) and Service

Layer Security (like Insecure software, Single point of failure, Integrity and Privacy) can be

well managed through deployment of blockchain infrastructure incorporating centralized

and decentralized layers (Viriyasitavat et al., 2019).

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Graphic 2. SoA-based IoT Architecture.

Source: (Viriyasitavat et al., 2019).

Additionally, access control protocols to safeguard IP spoong in a distributed environment

through smart contracts (Christidis & Devetsikiotis, 2016) is also essential which can be

managed via blockchain ledger. This has embarked upon a novel idea of inventing Public

Biometric Infrastructure in the blockchain enabled IoT.

2.2. POTENTIAL APPLICATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

Alexandru Stanciu is working on a novel standard called by him as Hyperledger Fabric for

blockchain enabled IoTs under the platform of IEC 61499 standard (Viriyasitavat et al.,

2019). This standard is inventing the development of standards for inputs, outputs, and

necessary protocol operations for blockchain enabled IoTs. We are of the opinion that many

of the UNs 17 SDGs can only be leveraged if technology is considered as priority option

of the developing countries. The potential applications include widespread integration of

contactless digital human computer interconnection with no mankind intervention. It is

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predicted that internet usage will be 28.5 billion devices by the year end 2022 means that

per capita network connected devices will stand at 3.6 by 2022.

Certainly, such a huge mobilization of network growth will emerge in generation of trillions

of bytes of data in many human prioritized applications like healthcare, smart cities,

environmental issues, GIS & Remote sensing, agricultural and food security, intelligent

transportation, green energy, and socio-economic technological growth. This all requires,

among many other things, a systematic integration of blockchain to the industrial IoT for

achieving the UNs SDGs by 2030.

3. METHODOLOGY

For validating the idea of nexus between blockchain and IoT, the many use case scenarios

have been developed in the author’s departments. This has facilitated tangible results to

yield. For example, one use case scenario is e-networked business model consisting of

student association, university administration and external and internal buyers to purchase

any facilities owned by the university through advertisement mechanism. The transfer of

access rights has been invoked between the involved parties or stakeholders.

The public and private blockchain benets and disadvantages have been identied using

dierent scenario conditions. A robust architecture is suggested comprising of dierent

users, devices, networking resources, self-executable crypto contracts, storage repositories,

auditable processes etc. An algorithm based on python le is created to act as a servicing

program responsible for load balancing and leader election that provides link between

the two blockchains. Our experimental setup is caried out on HP Notebook with 12 GB

memory having core i7 processor. Etherum software 1.8.27 and python 3.7 programming

language is used with Web3 library V 4.8.3.

Public and private nodes were designated. High-level language Solidity 0.5 is used for

writing smart contracts (Christidis & Devetsikiotis, 2016). Various decentralized and non-

distributed options have also been studied to analyze scalability. The scenarios developed

are for Access Generation (Pal et al., 2019), Electricity Cost as shown in Graphic 3 and 4

respectively, hostel accommodation cost, sweet water provision cost.

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Graphic 3. Access Generation.

Source: own elaboration.

In furtherance to this experimental work, the author has executed many case studies on

applications concerning blockchain enabled IoTs falling in SDGs domain.

4. RESULTS

For gathering fruitful results, the interpretive case study approach is used to gather the

data. A protocol was dened to design the structure. Several interviews and brainstorm

sessions were done in the author’s university/ departments. 15 social domains were selected

where blockchain enabled IoT data is gathered, transformed, and backed up using, ICT,

AI, and Machine Learning Tools. To verify the delegation chain, two design options as

serries 1 and series 2 were analyzed as shown in access generation graph using Breadth

First Search algorithm to ensure the contract trail. The results show that waiting time is

high enough. To reduce this waiting time, algorithm is improved in Electricity Cost as the

cost has linear relationship with delegation depth as shown in Graphic 4. By introducing

the novel algorithm, the blockchain ecacy has improved.

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Graphic 4. Electricity Cost.

Source: own elaboration.

5. CONCLUSIONS

In this research, the author has considered the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals as

the motivation to use blockchain enabled IoTs as a candidate technology for achieving

the goals by 2030. Having noticed the lack of security in block chain technology and

resource constrained architecture of the industrialized IoTs to tackle crypto-materialized

protocols, the emergence of private blockchain annexed with IoTs can contribute as a full-

edged secure system. This research shows that blockchain enabled IoTs can prove to be a

promising technology towards achieving the stainability.

5. ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The author acknowledges the cooperation of Computer Science and Engineering

Department and the management of Yanbu University College, Yanbu Industrial City,

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for supporting this research.

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