Blockchain, service-centric networking key to IoT success
“Frail connectivity, poor scalability, absent trust and cracked security” are among the problems that smart healthcare, self-driving vehicles, drones and other sensor-driven tech must address before “the dream” of monetization can be realized, they say in a whitepaper (pdf) published on their website.
While blockchain is going to be good for transactions, the underlying network won’t cope, they say. A traditional network, driven by centralization and without edge computing, won’t be robust enough, for one thing. The solution they propose is a mix of SCN and blockchain. It would be better than simply SCN, a fix suggested by some, or blockchain on its own, which has also been talked about.
SCN is a future-internet, efficiency-oriented stack that can allow applications to communicate using service names instead of addresses. It’s geared towards intermittent, challenging, non-host-centric connections. Routing requests to the closest instance in an edge-like manner is a key concept, for example.