Existing areas of interest for different industries, viz. Healthcare, Agriculture, Autonomous transportation industry, etc., with blockchain-based 5G-enabled IoT are shown in Fig.4.8. In all these applications, blockchain-based 5G enabled iIoT are used to amend the security, to enhance the bandwidth, and to reduce the overall capital as well as operational expenditure, respectively [25]. The detailed description of these industries is discussed in the following:
• Healthcare: Healthcare is one of the principal aspects of the prosperity of any nation. With the increase in the population all over the world, their health
architecture of 5G-enabled iIoT
Fig. 4.7 Development scenario of B5GIoT
4 Introduction of Blockchain and 5G-Enabled IoT Devices 97
Fig. 4.8 Scope of Blockchain in iIOT
management becomes crucial. There are numerous opportunities brought by IoT in healthcare. It helps real-time, continuous monitoring, and error-free diagnosis.
Electronic Health Record (EHR) repository is used by IoT in healthcare 4.0 [26].
Wherein data is stored centrally so that doctors can access it from anywhere.
Privacy and security of this real-time huge data is a major concern and here, the Blockchain can be used. Its distributed, decentralized, and tempered-proof behavior can resolve the privacy and security concerns. Dwivedi et al. [27]
proposed a novel model of blockchain for IoT-based healthcare system. They implemented distributed architecture and included security properties in the network. To facilitate the anonymous transactions by authentic users, they introduced a privacy-preserving ring signature scheme.
• Agriculture: Smart agriculture comes out as a vital IoT application for the agri- products exporting countries in agri-products exporting countries [28]. Use of IoT in agriculture that covers different operations like supply chain, precisions, and smart farming increases drastically. Ferrag et al. [28] analyzed and discussed the privacy-oriented blockchain-based solutions for IoT applications and their implementations for green IoT-based agriculture. They also discussed the secu- rity and privacy issues and solutions for green IoT-based agriculture.
• E-commerce and retail: Retailers and industries worldwide are very enthusiastic to use IoT to improve their business and customer experience. Inventory tracking and management become more easy and effective with IoT. By doing so, human errors can be reduced. The use of IoT also helps to minimize waste, control costs,
and reduce the shortage. For example, sensors for temperature-monitoring can be used to maintain optimal temperatures for perishable products and generate an alarm in case of predefined conditions [29]. Blockchain along with IoT in E- commerce will introduce a self-executing secure code called smart contract to manage various E-commerce activities. Also, it will open many directions to use IoT for smart contracts and B2B business more dexterously [29].
• Education industry: Introducing the Blockchain across the IoT platform for the education system could be an interesting methodology to enhance com- munication efficiency with the 5G network. The use of intelligent, powerful, and high-speed networks with several extant technologies, such as low power consumption, and so on, appear to be available in today’s world to connect with each other. The need of a secure education system invites the use of Blockchain along with IoT. Alam et al. [30] discussed Blockchain in IoT to create an efficient interaction system between students, teachers, employers, developers, facilitators, and accreditors on the Internet.
• Music industry: Because of the Revolution in internet technology and easy accessibility to numerous streaming facilities over the internet, the music industry has become one of the industries that can benefit from Blockchain. The music industry involves many stakeholders, viz. producers, publishers, lyricists, artists, labels, and streaming service providers. Due to the growth of internet technology and its easy access, maintenance of music ownership has become more crucial.
Transparency in payments and intellectual property rights is very essential for all the stakeholders of this industry. The integration of the Blockchain and the music industry can resolve several issues of ownership payment and transparency. The Blockchain can work as the best solution to create an accurate, immutable, and transparent distributed database to secure information of musical rights in a shared distributed ledger. Also, smart contracts can be used to execute a digital and secure contract/self-executing code for the music industry [31].
• Transportation industry: With the rapid development in sensing, communicating, and computing devices, the use of the Intelligent Transport System (ITS) is started and gets popular. It introduced a comfortable safe lifestyle with smarter transport facilities and more convenient transport services. The major issue with the traditional ITS is its centralized approach to store the data generated by IoT devices including sensors and vehicles. The usage of Blockchain for transportation can lead to secure, private, and safe methods of transportation service. Yuan et al. [32] discussed the Blockchain technology and its latent applications in the transportation industry. They also proposed a novel framework called Blockchain-Based ITS (B2 ITS) as an emerging decentralized architecture and distributed computing paradigm.
The applications of 5G-IoT and Blockchain are explored through various case studies in the different domains of society. The interesting case studies are discussed in the next section that covers the real-world scenarios of the combinations of these technologies.
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4 Blockchain with 5G-Enabled iIoT: Case Studies
In this section, we present the few interesting proposals and implementation of Blockchain in 5G-enabled iIoT.