Jan. 13, 2022 - The Industry IoT Consortium (IIC) today announced the Impact of Distributed Ledgers on Provider Networks whitepaper. The paper proposes several innovations service providers can consider, eliminating issues distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) can cause over a network. Industrial companies are leveraging DLTs for applications such as shipping-container tracking, vehicle identity and history, energy trading, and farm-to-store tracking. DLTs are ideal because they facilitate information sharing among trustworthy partners and enable companies to connect their manufacturing and logistic infrastructures to the industrial internet network for automated asset management, process control, predictive maintenance and more.
However, these peer-to-peer distributed ledgers can overload a service provider network due to wasted and inefficient communication among and between peers. "Peers can only communicate with other peers if their capabilities match, and some peers won't reply at all," said Mike McBride, senior director of innovation & technology strategy, Futurewei Technologies and co-chair of the IIC Industrial Distributed Ledger Tiger Team. "This wasted and inefficient communication affects application performance and leads to interoperability, scalability, and data privacy challenges for service providers."
The Impact of Distributed Ledgers on Provider Networks whitepaper proposes several network innovations, including implementing publish-subscribe systems and constraint-based service routing, both of which can improve network efficiency and eliminate wasteful DLT communication. "Network operators can also develop and offer new services," said Dr. Xinxin Fan, founding member, head of Cryptography, IoTeX, and co-chair of the IIC Industrial Distributed Ledger Tiger Team. "These include supply-chain integrity, DLT-as-a-service, identity services, energy trading, and smart contracts.
Service providers can also improve the security of services by integrating blockchain into IP routing protocols, for example." Download the Impact of Distributed Ledgers on Provider Networks whitepaper for more information and a complete list of authors.
About Industry IoT Consortium
The Industry IoT Consortium delivers transformative business value to industry, organizations, and society by accelerating the adoption of a trustworthy internet of things. The Industry IoT Consortium is a program of the Object Management Group (OMG).
