International Data Corp. (IDC) predicts that, in 2025, 75% of the
55.7 billion devices will link to an IoT platform of some sort.
As per Forbes, “The Internet of Things (IoT) has become
ubiquitous, and the number of connected devices is expected to
grow to 29.3 billion by 2023.”
Obviously, for any IoT ecosystem, some of the biggest issues can be
privacy, security, and scalability. For billions of devices, we need a
super-fast ecosystem which would be availed by the 5G network. At
the same time, the underlying DLT network can handle the issues of
transparency, immutability, and trust with cryptography.
Also, it would be a great challenge for the centralized servers to
manage such huge load for authentication and access management.
Decentralized identity backed by Blockchain or DLT can be pretty
useful to assign identity to every machine, whether big or small, and
at the same time, authenticating them to any third party. This
mechanism would ensure that a device can be identified by millions
of other devices and servers leading to an efficient and secure
machine-to-machine or M2M communication.
Hyperledger Fabric has recently come up with a paper where they
have demonstrated how decentralized identity for the IoT machines
can improve security, network quality assurance, customer
experience, visibility, transparency, data access, and user content in
the IoT devices.
Figure 19.1 shows the integration of Blockchain components with
various BSS/OSS systems in the Telecom domain, such as order
management, CRM, billing, user and enterprise dashboards, as
shown as follows: