In the paper “Positioning of blockchain mechanisms in IoT-powered smart home systems: A gateway-based approach ”, by Daniel Minoli, Principal Guest Editor of the Elsevier Special Issue of the IoT Journal on IoT Blockchains, a number of existing smart home IoT automation architectures are assessed with a view to the applicability of BC mechanisms to this particular use case. Specifically, the paper affords the conclusion that in most instances of home automation, a potential topological place to start the BC is in the home gateway that supports the processing and computing required to aggregate or in-network-preprocess the data flows from the various appliances; however, the computing and storage requirements may limit this deployment paradigm to a subset of cases. Alternatively, the place to start the BC could be in the fog-to-core gateway point, but in this case this process does not fully guarantee end-to-end integrity. The actual Proof of Work (PoW) functionality would likely be in the core network and not in the relatively low computing-power home gateway. Another alternative envisions private local BCs to be instituted in the home area network, but still not necessarily for all appliance-generated transactions due to the large volume of such status, event, and usage data. It is implicit in this paper that although gateway costs for home applications have remained relatively stable in the past five years, an implementer would not utilize a home gateway when there is only one appliance in a home that needs to be supported (for example, just a sauna or just a hot tub); in that case, direct communication from the cloud to the appliance would be more optimal and, in this instance, if a BC is required it would have to be implemented in the edge/fog network, in the backbone, or among the service/analytics servers. The general use of a gateway in the home, however, presupposes that all appliance vendors have agreed to use one gateway technology, which is, unfortunately, unlikely in the near term.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542660519302525
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542660519302537
