Exploring Lightweight Blockchain Solutions for Internet of Things: Review

The world is witnessing a major digital transformation and is moving towards more interaction, connectivity, ease, and intelligence through the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT offers these advantages to the world by linking necessary devices with each other, making it easier to manage and deal with those devices. However, the IoT faces many challenges, such as authentication, privacy, security, and access management. The application of blockchain technology may provide a solution to these challenges. Nevertheless, applying blockchain technology may face limitations, such as the limited resources of the IoT devices used and the resource-intensive requirements of the blockchain. Therefore, to overcome these limitations, several studies have proposed using a lightweight blockchain; this blockchain is specifically designed for resource-limited IoT devices. In this paper, a comprehensive review has been made on the uses of lightweight blockchain in the IoT. Moreover, we identified some of the challenges facing the application of blockchain technologies in the IoT and the future directions.