BENIGREEN: Blockchain-Based Energy-Efficient Privacy-Preserving Scheme for Green IoT

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.