271

Blockchain versus IOTA Tangle

16.3.2  Related Works on IOTA

As said earlier, IOTA Tangle utilizes a data structure specifically designed for IoT. It

is fee free and validates transactions without miners, unlike blockchain architecture.

Blockchain employs the PoW concept as a consensus mechanism to validate transac­

tions. However, Vigneri and Welz (2020) designed an adaptive rate control protocol

using PoW to prevent spam transactions among IoT devices. Cullen et al. (2021) pro­

posed a new architecture DLT that supports “reputation based on Sybil protection”

to be integrated into the IOTA Tangle (that is, DAG). The authors’ (Cullen et al.,

2021) goal is to address the access control problem and the computation limitation of

devices. The “reputation-based Sybil protection” is used to substitute for PoW, used

in traditional blockchain architecture.

16.3.3  IoT Background and Related Works

Kevin Ashton first coined the term Internet of Things in 1999 during his proposal of

integrating RFID into Procter and Gamble’s supply chain (Ashton, 2009). His idea

was that since people are usually very busy, there was a need to use RFID sensors

to empower computers to gather information randomly by themselves without being

limited by humans entering the data. IoT is seen as the Internet’s future, drastically

reducing a human-to-human interaction while increasing M2M transactions. It prom­

ises to unify everything in our world under one architecture while at the same time

giving us control over many things and keeping us informed on the goings-on around

us (Bansal and Rana, 2017). IoT as a new revolution of the Internet describes a future

with the possibility of connecting all physical devices (Yehia et al., 2015), which will

communicate among themselves independently of human intervention. These devices

will affect all facets of our everyday life, such as in monitoring our health status, our

homes and offices, and water and air quality, among others. The history of IoT can be

traced back to the early telemetry system, which began in Chicago around 1912, in

which telephone lines were used to monitor data from power plants (Zennaro, 2016).

In the 1930s, telemetry expanded to weather monitoring using devices known as radio­

sondes. The Sputnik, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957 during the space race era,

became the basis for aerospace telemetry, which later gave birth to today’s global satel­

lite communications. Also, according to Zennaro (2016), M2M technologies began in

the 1980s as wired communication began to advance towards wireless in the 1990s.

Several enabling technologies that have aided the rise of IoT include ubiquitous con­

nectivity, widespread adoption and expansion of the IP address regime, computing eco­

nomics, miniaturization, advances in data analytics and the rise of cloud computing.

Fundamental characteristics of IoT include interconnectivity, heterogeneity, dyna­

mism and enormity. Regarding interconnectivity, almost anything can be intercon­

nected to this global information and communications infrastructure. These devices

are mostly heterogeneous, coming from different hardware manufacturers and net­

work architectures. Despite this heterogeneity, the devices can integrate and inter­

face seamlessly with one another based on IoT standards. IoT devices are dynamic

in their ability to change state quickly in the shortest possible time. They could move

from sleep/standby to the awake or active state. They could promptly activate various

sensory modes as soon as they detect a state change, moving from the disconnected