Lieb, N. (2018). Opportunities of blockchain for industry 4.0 – energy impacts for the industrial Internet of things [Master Thesis, Technische Universität Wien; Diplomatische Akademie Wien]. reposiTUm. https://doi.org/10.34726/hss.2018.57105
Information and communication systems (ICT) are an essential part of today's society, with strong negative impacts on the environment due to its energy consumption. However, its utilization is believed it can have indirect positive impacts on resource consumption reduction through new concepts to generate, allocate, distribute, share and use energy environmentally-friendly. A new major technology, blockchain, receives a great amount of attention regarding energy efficiency, since it allows distributed network applications and therefore is believed to revolutionize computing. Especially applications for industrial production, with utilization within an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) have been waiting for a technology leap to make industrial processes more efficient. This Master Thesis investigates the energy efficiency of a blockchain architecture believed to be suited for use in an Industrial Internet of Things based on the ME³SA model for sustainable software compiling. The results show that while the blockchain claiming to be IoT-optimized, IOTA, performs well in terms of energy consumption, the hardware utilization is very high, leaving no room for other applications to run in sideline. Recommendations include artificial enlargement of the network until a sufficient number of participants is reached, reducing CPU utilization, and a reduction of prerequisites to run the blockchain network on smaller ‘smart’ objects. Further research could include comparative analysis as well as investigation under operating environment.
