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Blockchain versus IOTA Tangle

16.4.1  IOTA Projects

The IOTA Foundation has developed massive technological backbones for build­

ing a variety of products across various industries. For instance, in the automobile

industry, there is a digital wallet framework that would provide access for cars to

autonomously pay for services like battery charging, parking, toll fees and lots more.

The Digital Twins is another IOTA framework that provides transparent tracking for

the lifecycle of the vehicle. It could be used to track vehicle ownership, usage, fraud

detection, etc.

Currently, there are numerous real-world products already running on the plat­

forms mentioned earlier. For brevity, this chapter cites two existing IOTA projects.

First, there is a Jaguar Land Rover car wallet that runs on the Tangle. It enables

automated payment services, such as sending and receiving payments (IOTA-

Foundation, n.d). Second is smart charging with IOTA ElaaNL (IOTA-Foundation,

n.d). This is a plug and play device based on the Tangle that enables electric vehicles

to pay automatically for charging a car. Moreover, IOTA provides opportunities in

various application domains, including healthcare, digital entities, smart cities and

supply chain, to name a few. All in all, IOTA has a large market share in the 4.0

industry revolution.

16.5  HOW DOES THE ARCHITECTURE OF BLOCKCHAIN

AND IOTA AFFECT THE INTERNET OF THINGS?

This section discusses the distinction between the two DLTs concerned, blockchain

and IOTA, and how it affects efficiency in IoT networks. Specifically, two features

will be considered in this comparison: Consensus protocol and data structure.

16.5.1  Consensus Protocol

Various DLTs adopt various consensus protocols to secure the network. Some are

implemented in public DLTs, while others are used in private ones. The popular

ones are PoW, proof of stake (PoS), Byzantine Agreement method, Raft, VRF-

Based method, Sharding-based method and their respective variants. Generally,

most DLTs, including Ethereum, Cardano and Binance, adopt the consensus as dis­

cussed in algorithms for transaction verification (Salimitari and Chatterjee, 2018).

Unfortunately, they involve high computing overhead, high network overhead, high

storage overhead, low throughput and many more (Salimitari and Chatterjee, 2018).

These limitations make them unsuitable for low-slung resource-constrained IoT

devices. On the other hand, Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), a variant of

the Byzantine Agreement method adopted in the hyper ledger, does not involve high

computing power, low computing overhead, low network, and inadequate storage

overhead. However, the hyper ledger is a private blockchain. Therefore, its network

capacity is limited (accommodating only a few devices) (Salimitari and Chatterjee,

2018). Readers may refer to Salimitari and Chatterjee (2018) for more details on

diverse consensus protocols.