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The Internet of Things (IoT), forming the foundation of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), connects a huge number of ubiquitous sensing and mobile computing devices. The mobile IoT systems generate an enormous volume of a variety of dynamic context data and typically count on centralized architectures to process them. However, their inability to ensure security and decline in communication efficiency and response time with the increase in the size of IoT network are some of the many concerning weaknesses that are holding back the fast-paced growth of IoT. Realizing the limitations of centralized systems, recently blockchain-based decentralized architecture is being considered as the key to redesigning the IoT systems in a way that is designed to be secure, transparent, highly resistant to outages, auditable, and efficient. However, before realizing the new promise of blockchain for IoT, there are significant challenges to address. One fundamental challenge is the scale issue around data collection, storage, and analytic as IoT sensor devices possess limited computational power and storage capabilities. In particular, since the chain is always growing, IoT devices require more and more resources. Thus, an oversized chain poses storage and scalability problems. With this in mind, the overall goal of our research is to design a lightweight scalable blockchain framework for IoT of mobile devices. This framework, coined as "Sensor-Chain", promises a new generation of lightweight blockchain management with a superior reduction in resource consumption, and at the same time capable of retaining critical information about the IoT systems of mobile devices.
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This content will become publicly available on March 22, 2026
Blockchain-Enabled Communication Framework for Secure and Scalable Healthcare Data Processing
The need for secure and efficient communication between connected devices continues to grow in healthcare systems within smart cities. Secure communication of healthcare data in Internet of Things (IoT) systems is critical to ensure patient privacy and data integrity. Problems with healthcare communication, like data breaches, integrity issues, scalability issues, and cyber threats, make it harder for people to trust doctors, cause costs to rise, stop people from using new technology, and put private data at risk. So, this paper presents a blockchain-based hybrid method for sending secure healthcare data that combines IoT systems with blockchain technology and high-tech encryption techniques like elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). The proposed method uses the public key of a smart contract to encrypt private data to protect its privacy. It also uses cryptographic hashing and digital signatures to make sure that the data is correct and real. The framework stores metadata (e.g., hashes and signatures) on-chain, and large data uses off-chain storage like IPFS to reduce costs and improve scalability. It also incorporates a mechanism to authenticate IoT devices and enable secure communication across heterogeneous networks. Moreover, this work bridges gaps in existing solutions by providing an end-to-end secure communication system for healthcare applications. It provides strong data security and efficient storage for a reliable and scalable way to handle healthcare data safely in IoT ecosystems.
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- PAR ID:
- 10632337
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 979-8-3315-0484-7
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 64 to 69
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Concord, NC, USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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