Research work · 2026
A lightweight blockchain framework for secure and scalable IoT communication
Frontiers in Blockchain
Abstract
Introduction The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has introduced significant challenges related to secure and efficient communication among resource-constrained devices. Although blockchain offers strong security features such as decentralization and immutability, conventional blockchain frameworks incur substantial computational, communication, and storage overheads, limiting their applicability in IoT environments. Methods This study proposes a lightweight blockchain architecture for secure IoT communication by integrating edge computing, hash-based data storage, and a lightweight consensus mechanism. Computational tasks are offloaded to edge nodes, while only hashed information is maintained on the blockchain to reduce storage requirements and improve overall system efficiency. Results Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves up to 71% reduction in computational cost, 66% reduction in communication delay, 93% reduction in storage overhead, and 68% savings in energy consumption compared with existing state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, the architecture maintains a stable throughput of 105 transactions per second, representing an improvement of up to 160% over baseline methods under high node-density scenarios. Discussion and Conclusion The obtained results indicate that the proposed lightweight blockchain architecture effectively balances security, efficiency, and scalability for IoT networks. By minimizing resource consumption while preserving data integrity and transaction throughput, the framework provides a practical solution for supporting large-scale, real-time IoT applications and demonstrates the feasibility of lightweight blockchain technologies for resource-constrained environments.