Energy optimization with authentication and cost effective storage in the wireless sensor IoTs using blockchain

In this paper, a hybrid blockchain-based authentication scheme is proposed that provides the mechanism to authenticate the randomly distributed sensor IoTs. These nodes are divided into three types: ordinary nodes, cluster heads and sink nodes. For authentication of these nodes in a Wireless Sensor IoTs (WSIoTs), a hybrid blockchain model is introduced. It consists of both private and public blockchains, which are used to authenticate ordinary nodes and cluster heads, respectively. Moreover, to handle the issue of cluster head failure due to inefficient energy consumption, Improved Heterogeneous Gateway-based Energy-Aware Multi-hop Routing (I-HMGEAR) protocol is proposed in combination with blockchain. It provides a mechanism to efficiently use the overall energy of the network. Besides, the processed data of subnetworks is stored on blockchain that causes the issue of increased monetary cost. To solve this issue, an external platform known as InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is used, which distributively stores the data on different devices. The simulation results show that our proposed model outperforms existing clustering scheme in terms of network lifetime and data storage cost of the WSIoTs. Our proposed scheme increases the lifetime of the network as compared to existing trust management model, intrusion prevention and multi WSN authentication schemes by 17.5%, 24.2% and 19.6%, respectively.