Rethinking Blockchain Integration with the Industrial Internet of Things

Blockchain is a decentralized technology that protects sensitive data from being controlled by a central authority and can play a vital security role in developing the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Most IIoT-blockchain systems focus on optimizing consensus mechanisms, which cannot provide satisfactory scalability until addressing the inherited problems of the networking infrastructure. Excessive messaging overheads and low networking performance are two critical issues of the current blockchain configurations. Moreover, the well-known architectural models, cloud-centric and fog-centric models, cannot provide acceptable performance in IIoT due to data aggregation and synchronization timing overheads, privacy, and trust issues. As such, we propose two novel blockchain solutions that can fulfill IIoT's strict challenges and requirements. First, the context-aware data-driven solution decreases irrelevant and useless data traffic. Second, the hybrid communications with sec-ond-layer chain solutions partition the data traffic through different communication media and provide better scalability and higher resistance against security issues. Finally, we present a future vision of the next blockchain generation that can fulfill the IIoT predictions.