Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has been revolutionized in recent times that handles the diversity of consumer and industrial applications, viz. smart homes, smart cities, smart grids, healthcare, agriculture, smart industries, and many more. The consumer IoT (cIoT) focuses on improving the quality of people’s lives while industrial IoT (iIoT) combines Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT) together resulting into tremendous growth of industries driven by distinct manufacturing, transportation, logistics, and functionalities. In addition to that, the fifth generation (5G) networks accelerate iIot with a higher transmission speed, a lower latency, an increased number of connected devices, and the possibility of implementing virtual networks (network slicing). The 5G- enabled IoT (5G-IoT) will connect billions of IoT devices communicating with each other in real-time manner without human interventions which leads to the deployment of a gigantic number of devices without worrying about network traffic or network related issues. However, 5G-enabled IoT devices to suffer from privacy and security issues when used with the centralized approach which is more vulnerable to attackers. To resolve the same, Blockchain stands out as a promising technology as it offers a secure, transparent, reliable, and tempered-proof environment for 5G-enabled IoT due to its distributed and peer-to-peer network architecture. Therefore, in this chapter, we introduce the basic architecture and main features of Blockchain along with how Blockchain can be integrated with 5G-enabled IoT. Subsequently, the security requirements to manage 5G-enabled IoT devices are also illustrated. Additionally, the opportunities, applications, issues and challenges, limitations and research directions of Blockchain-based 5G-enabled iIoT are explored that will be helpful to the researchers to dive into the area of IoT and Blockchain.