Energy-Efficient Edge Computing Framework for Internet of Things (IoT) Networks

Abstract

The increased growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the healthcare field, in urban development, in industrial automation, and in supply chain management, has presented urgent security issues, including unauthorized access, information tampering, privacy loss, and single points of failure, that are usually not considered by traditional security tools because of distributed and resource-constrained IoT networks. The paper explores the blockchain technology as a powerful security architecture to the IoT and follows the descriptive-analytical research method and uses a Python-based simulation, which was run on Google Colab. The simulation combined real-time streams of IoT sensors with a proof-of-work consensus mechanism and HMAC-based device verification of authenticating the devices to assess the main metrics including transaction latency, throughput, data immutability, tamper detection, and system reliability under the conditions of diverse operational conditions. According to the results of the experiment, blockchain can boost the security of IoT by providing data immutability, decentralized trust, and automatic verification and is able to identify malicious manipulations of data. When comparing the performance to a baseline system (no-chain) it is apparent that, despite the blockchain causing quantifiable latency overheads through consensus and cryptographic functionality, the end-to-end delay is relatively small in most IoT applications. The results also point to practical implementation aspects, such as the limitations of scalability and energy usage, which indicate that hybrid solutions that combine lightweight consensus mechanism and off-chain storage can be the best option.