Game-theoretic Designs for Blockchain-based IoT: Taxonomy and Research Directions

In the last few years, the combination of the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technologies has widely attracted significant research attention from academia and the industry due to the salient characteristics of blockchain and its natural compatibility with the functional requirements of IoT architectures. Despite the advantages of utilizing the blockchain in IoT systems, several issues have been raised regarding the mitigation of security attacks on blockchain-based IoT systems, management of blockchain operations, node communications, energy consumption, efficient consensus algorithm design, data sharing, and edge/fog computing. Many of the solutions proposed in the literature tried to address these issues using game-theoretic models. This paper surveys and investigates state-of-the-art blockchain-based IoT solutions leveraging game theory to address common issues in blockchain design. The developed taxonomy enabled us to highlight existing challenges to the integration of game theory models into the design of blockchain-driven IoT and bring forward some critical research questions.