The energy conservative extension of the Internet of Things (IoT), green IoT, is a revolutionary approach in connecting people, processes, and things in an energy-efficient way. The existing research works in the domain of green IoT forbid the use of decentralized management (e.g., blockchain) of data due to its intrinsic disadvantages of block mining, transaction incentives, and less throughput. However, the advantages of blockchains urge the development of new decentralized strategies utilizing the architecture of green IoT. The infancy stage of the conjunction between green IoT and blockchains, and the need of decentralization in energy management in green IoT motivate us for the present research. In this article, we address the problems of decentralization, energy conservation, and privacy simultaneously. We introduce the first blockchain-based privacy-preserving framework for green IoT. We name this framework 'Blockchain-based energy-efficient and privacy-preserving data management scheme for GREEN-iot (BENIGREEN)' for smart cities. BENIGREEN uses weight metrics for energy-efficient cluster heads (CHs) selection. The use of weight metrics is a novel contribution in the field of green IoT. Furthermore, we integrate a decentralized blockchain framework with an authentication scheme for secure transmission among base station (BS) and sensor nodes by employing registration, certification, and revocation phases. Consequently, BS allocates the collected information from CHs to decentralized blockchain and cloud storage. The BS eliminates all malicious nodes from the network by employing a certificate revocation process. We execute thorough experiments in terms of the operation time, throughput, average energy consumption, and computational latency. The comparative analysis with the state-of-the-art schemes show that BENIGREEN is efficient for IoT paradigm.@en

The progress of sensor devices, digital communication, and computing techniques enhances the functionalities of e-healthcare, where the medical facilities are manageable based on the Internet. Now a days, e-healthcare not only helps in disease diagnosis, or tele-medicine, but also implies to general medical scope and medical resource management. Thus, Internet-of-Medical Thing (IoMT) becomes an umbrella term to connect e-healthcare, tele-medicine, and medical supply chain management. In the recent past, the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has shown the loopholes in the existing medical systems such as the mismanagement of medical resources and the unavailability of the basic requirements for patients. The medical infrastructure urges for the new frameworks to handle accountability and transparent governance in a medical emergency situation. This motivates us to address medical resource accountability in e-healthcare. In the present work, we introduce the first resource accountability framework to balance the demand–supply of medical facilities in an e-healthcare and IoMT ecosystem. Our solution is based on blockchain and we call it bloCkchained framework for resOUrce accouNTability (COUNT). We use a customized Proof of Vote (PoV) for consensus in COUNT. We call this consensus COUNT-PoV, which is another direction of novelty in our solution. The blocks in the proposed COUNT contain the resource requirements and their availability–production–supply status. Multiple stakeholders are involved in the process based on providing pre-attained credentials; thus, COUNT supports consortium blockchain. Existing literature shows a number of studies for blockchain-based frameworks for e-healthcare; however, those works do not address the accountability and transparency issues of medical e-governance and balancing the demand–supply of the medical facilities/resources. Therefore, our proposed COUNT is beneficial for e-healthcare and IoMTs. We use signcryption process to reduce the complexity of the cryptographic processes, which is an add-on to the contribution. We evaluate our proposed framework based on the Hyperledger Caliper benchmark test with latency, throughput, and resource consumption. Additionally, we also analyse the cost of the implementation. The comparative analysis of our consensus with other stake-based consensus protocols on the COUNT framework shows that our consensus, COUNT-PoV is efficient and suitable for the use of e-healthcare and IoMTs. Moreover, being a generic framework, COUNT is helpful for the e-governance of medical facilities, the vaccination process, and COVID passports.@en

Industrial applications and automation controls are closely connected with heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Network (WSN); thus, Industrial Internet-of Thing (IIoT) enhances the productivity, scalability, and flexibility of the operations. However, in many cases such as tracking a device or service localization becomes very crucial to state back the operations at times. Existing literature show a various localization solutions, but they face the drawbacks of high energy consumption, and non-coherence in heterogeneity. Besides, in a WSN-based IIoT, non-cooperativeness exists among nodes due to various system and environmental parameters, which make the system resource-exhaustive. In this paper, we introduce a novel localization algorithm that addresses the above-mentioned problems. We call our proposed algorithm RAnge-free Power efficient COoperative Localization (RAPCOL). Specifically, the use of co-operative beacon nodes to broadcast the information to Base Station and low energy consumption highlights the novelty of the work. RAPCOL uses weight metrics for selecting optimal cooperative beacon nodes to prolong the network lifetime. We also introduce an Improvised Particle Swarm Optimization (IPSO) that credits in the contribution in RAPCOL. We run a overall nine sets of experiments to analyze the localization accuracy, effect of beacon nodes, sensor nodes, network connectivity, and sensing field, error frequency, residual energy, time, and network lifetime. A comparative study with the existing localization models shows that RAPCOL is 30 % better than the existing models in terms of accuracy and resource consumption. We observe stable performance of RAPCOL with a differentiated effect of beacon nodes and sensor nodes. We also observe that our proposed IPSO 20 % better in fast convergence to the optimal solution. Though RAPCOL localization time is 12 % higher than other existing protocols, RAPCOL’s accuracy and energy saving mechanism make it efficient for IIoTs.@en

Internet of Things (IoT) composed of large number of sensing devices with a variety of features applicable for various applications. In such scenarios, due to low data handling capabilities, limited storage, and security aspects, it is quite challenging to protect networks against illegal information access and utilizes storage efficiently. Though researchers provide various solutions for security and data storage, but a few solutions are appropriate for wireless sensor networks (WSNs)-enabled IoTs. Therefore, a blockchain-based decentralized framework integrated with authentication and privacy-preserving schemes is developed for the secure communication in WSNs-enabled IoTs. Registration, certification, and revocation process are employed for the communication with sensor nodes and base station (BS) in a cloud computing environment. In this scheme cluster heads forward the collected information to the BS. Consequently, BS records all the key parameters on the distributed blockchain and large data is forwarded to clouds for the storage. The revoked certificates of all malicious nodes are eliminated from blockchain by BS. The performance of the proposed scheme is scrutinized in terms of detection accuracy, certification delay, computational, and communicational overheads. The simulated results, comparative analysis, and security validation support the superiority of the proposed solution over the existing approaches. @en