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Blockchain Technology and the Internet of Things: Addressing Speed Challenges
The vision of a fully connected world is rapidly becoming a reality, with billions of devices – from sensors to self-driving vehicles and industrial machinery – collecting and exchanging data online. Ensuring the security and integrity of this data is paramount, driving increased exploration of blockchain technology. While often associated with cryptocurrencies, blockchain’s core strength lies in its ability to act as a decentralized digital ledger, shared and maintained across multiple computers rather than controlled by a single entity. However, the speed limitations of most blockchain systems pose a significant hurdle for many real-world Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
The Speed bottleneck in IoT Blockchain Systems
Smart devices frequently enough require near-instantaneous responses, operating on timescales of fractions of a second. Current blockchain networks frequently struggle to meet thes demands. Research indicates that the primary source of these delays isn’t the blockchain software itself, but rather the communication methods used within peer-to-peer networks. Previous studies have frequently enough overlooked the impact of network topology – the structure of connections between devices – on performance in IoT blockchain systems.
Improving Efficiency Through Network Design
A research team led by Associate Professor Kien nguyen from the Institute for Advanced Academic Research/Graduate School of informatics, Chiba University, Japan, investigated methods to enhance efficiency in IoT blockchain networks. Their findings, published in IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management in December 2025, analyze how different network topologies affect speed and introduce a novel technique to streamline data flow. “We aimed to bridge the gap between theoretical design and practical deployment of IoT-blockchain systems by identifying the fundamental causes of their high latency and proposing a decentralized solution that is both simple and effective,” explains Dr. Nguyen. The research was conducted in collaboration with Koki Koshikawa, Yue Su, and Hiroo Sekiya, all from Chiba University.
Identifying the Root Cause: Duplicate Data Transmission
The team’s simulations revealed that decentralized IoT networks often transmit the same data redundantly. Existing methods for sharing transactions (individual data entries) and blocks (collections of verified records) can lead to a proliferation of duplicate copies. As these duplicates propagate through overlapping communication paths, network congestion increases, causing data to queue and
