Cross-Industry Blockchain Technology: Opportunities and Challenges in Industry 4.0

Blockchain and IoT are the most exciting technologies in the current world, combining these two together may resolve a lot of issues. In the current scenario, we are using IoT devices in nearly everything. By the end of this era, we can presume that all of our day-to-day use devices will be smart. But with this various issue may rise like safety, security, and performance concerns of smart devices. To resolve these issues, blockchain technology has emerged as a very powerful tool. In this chapter, the basics of blockchain along with its architecture and algorithms involved are discussed. IoT challenges and related literature are also discussed along with blockchain as an efficient technology to resolve these issues. The chapter also includes the challenges in using blockchain in IoT devices.

The concept of blockchain has shown tremendous potential and growth in the last decade. The terms such as blockchain and digital ledger technology are used interchangeably. Many research efforts have been madto explain and harness the benefits of digital ledger technology for the financial sector. Digital currency or cryptocurrency is a technological currency based on the block chain concept.

The focus of this chapter is to provide brief knowledge about the concept and advantages of integrating Big Data and blockchain technology. As we are focusing on the blockchain and Big Data, it is suitable to introduce Big Data before exploring its interactions with blockchain. The blockchain technology is introduced and then the interaction between blockchain technology and Big Data is focused, in order to gain a clear understanding of how blockchain technology is used for Big Data. Thereafter, the different applications of blockchain and Big Data are explored.

Since blockchain is the central technology of bitcoin, block chain has gained a lot of attention in recent years. Its applications are expanding in a variety of fields, including Internet of Things (IoT) defense, banking, industries, and medical centre. Furthermore, IoT has grown in popularity because of its widespread usage in smart homes and urban developments around the world. This paper presents the design of an automated system for a greenhouse focusing mainly on Hydroponics. Along with the design, the purpose of this study is monitoring, control, and visualization of the data. This project addresses some of the issues in traditional farming. Issues like incapability of agriculture due to small and fragmented land holdings, risk in using manures and pesticides, and lack of mechanization. The segments of this project include the main module (referred to as AGMS), the cloud, and the end user. The data visualization is done through a website that will acquire it from a Wi-Fi module through APIs. The study also includes social media alerts to platforms like Twitter and mail.

This review revolves around the idea of inculcating and amalgamating all the possible forte of healthcare that can be governed and handled by Blockchain Technology (BCT). Relating back to all the archaic systems involved in the healthcare sector, the entire process was quite slow and many a time leads to a significant amount of delay in any process, be it report of the patient, tracking data from the smart watch, ruling out appointment from a doctor, medicine prescription and many more. BCT in fusion with the Internet of Things (IoT), leads to generating a completely revolutionary and robust system that expands its range from very minute detail to a completely new horizon. As predicted by 2022, more than 18 billion devices will be available across the world; thus, managing this data that is related to healthcare, devising BCT for same can yield some exponential results in advancement in health care sector. This entire healthcare data is quite vulnerable to all the cyber-attacks and all the collected valuable information may be at a huge risk; hence by deploying BCT, security can be greatly increased. BCT is nothing but an immutable time stamp series of records, just like an array working; when even one of the blocks is initialized with any value of information, that piece of information will remain there forever. This review attempts to group together all such various fields that can be brought under a single umbrella covering the range of fields that can be governed by BCT in accordance with IoT for the development of health care sector.

Among the various technologies that are constructing the pillars deep in the field of engineering, ad-hoc networks are one of the major fields of research. On the grounds of history, Mobile ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) played a prominent role in battlefield communication and other important applications, but another emerging network named as Vehicular ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) offered wireless communication led to its popular usage that resulted in the major deployment of adhoc networks. However, in VANET, secure message transmission is still a challenge, so we propose a local blockchain to disseminate the message in vehicular networks to improve the security issues. The public blockchain technique in VANET ensures trustbased secure message transmission in the Vehicular ad-hoc Network.