Will Blockchain technology become a reality in sensor networks?

The need for sensors to deliver, communicate, collect, alert, and share information in various applications has made wireless sensor networks very popular. However, due to its limited resources in terms of computation power, battery life and memory storage of the sensor nodes, it is challenging to add security features to provide the confidentiality, integrity, and availability. In order to communicate reliably with trust and authenticity, providing data and system security especially for those sensors dealing with sensitive data related to healthcare, military activity, environmental sensing for weather prediction or seismic data etc. is vital. Blockchain technology ensures security and avoids the need of any trusted third party for security. However, applying Blockchain in a resource-constrained wireless sensor network is a challenging task because Blockchain is power, computation, and memory hungry in nature and demands heavy bandwidth due to control overheads. In this paper, a new routing and a private communication Blockchain framework is designed and tested with sensors generating constant and continuous data (like voice and video). However, it is realized that even if computation and bandwidth requirements are taken for granted, storage and battery life will cripple the sustainability of Blockchain application in sensor networks especially for high data generating sensors. The proposed Load Balancing Multi- Hop (LBMH) routing shares and enhances the battery life of the Cluster Heads and reduce control overhead during Block updates, but due to limited storage and energy of the sensor nodes, Blockchain in sensor networks may never be a reality unless storage and battery life of sensor devices are not limited on the one hand and computation power and bandwidth availability are high, on the other.