Submission Deadline: 25 January 2024 (closed) View: 113
At present, the term industrial IoT has become the buzzword with tremendous applications. The future of industrial applications is at a pace towards rapid transformation with cutting-edge technologies such as industrial IoT, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. The efficient use of these technologies automates the industrial infrastructure and helps supervise the industrial processes. Further, with the tremendous increase in product complexities, globalization, and growing customer demands, most enterprises today are switching towards industrial IoT applications. These rapid advancements in the industrial IoT sector gave rise to data-driven approaches and enabled them to make use of big data analytics. The result is a more automated and faster industrial environment with reduced production time and efforts. However, the present-day IIoT system faces tremendous security, reliability, compliance, and management challenges. The connected devices in industrial IoT are usually designed in consideration of the user experience with easy network access. Access to the services is given automatically or made through the user credentials, which give rise to numerous security-related constraints.
Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology, very hard to tamper with and offer greater security measures. The security features of the blockchain are associated with stronger public-key cryptographic protocols. Further, it adds the decentralization features to the system. Some of the considerable benefits of implementing blockchain in industrial IoT include improved smart contracts, optimized energy consumption, gaining deeper insights, enhanced data security, building a decentralized environment, access to a larger volume of data, automation of the industrial process, saving time and reducing the surplus cost associated with industrial processes. In the industrial context, the use of blockchain collects the data and stores it securely in an immutable way. It significantly transfers the depth of the data and the processing speed at which it is processed across the industries for efficient decision making. The convergence of blockchain for industrial IoT promotes secure data analytics, which allows the industrial professional to provide new innovative services to the end-users. It assists in making better business intelligence and helps in the provision of new innovative services to the end-users. Most importantly, it helps in the realization of data-driven technologies through the effective use of smart technologies.
This special issue aims to investigate the emerging trends in blockchain for secure and privacy-preserving industrial IoT. We welcome researchers and practitioners working in this discipline to present their novel and unpublished research findings.