A Secure Epidemic Routing Using Blockchain in Opportunistic Internet of Things

With expanding applications of the opportunistic Internet of things, there has been an ever-increasing enthusiasm in integrating blockchain with the IoT for enhancing privacy and security. However, due to high resource consumption by the blockchain, its implementation becomes a potential task for IoT networks. The main purpose of the paper is to develop a lightweight and secure communication protocol using blockchain architecture for decentralized IoT networks. Blockchain keeps a track of the messages, which are transmitted through the network. A traditional opportunistic IoT network sends multiple copies of messages for communicating information from source to destination, which gives rise to the risk of network security. Therefore, this paper proposes a secure routing protocol based on epidemic nature by integrating blockchain to ensure security and privacy. The main idea behind using blockchain is to keep a distributed ledger of all the messages (transactions), which are being transmitted through the network. For the simulation of our proposed network, we use the random waypoint model which we believe perfectly simulates the mobility of opportunistic devices.