Research on Blockchain for Adapting to Node Dynamics in Internet of Things

ABSTRACT Background Blockchain, as a decentralized and distributed ledger, shows significant application potential and commercial value in the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the dynamicity of IoT nodes introduces significant challenges to traditional blockchain systems. Specifically, in dynamic environments involving node joins/leaves, mobility, and state changes, traditional solutions often suffer from poor security, significant consensus latency, and severe storage overhead. Although blockchain for IoT has been extensively surveyed, prior reviews fail to provide a comprehensive evaluation because the existing literature considers security, consensus, and scalability only as separate issues, while overlooking node dynamics as a fundamental dimension. Objective This paper aims to provide a systematic investigation of blockchain adaptation to node dynamics in IoT and to establish a comprehensive evaluation perspective for analyzing the impacts of node dynamics on security, consensus, and scalability. Methods To this end, this paper systematically investigates these challenges through three contributions. Firstly, a unified taxonomy of node dynamics is proposed to analyze the impacts on security, consensus, and scalability. Secondly, it synthesizes representative solutions across trust evaluation, consensus algorithms, and scalability techniques. Thirdly, it introduces a three‐dimensional evaluation approach to comprehensively analyze these solutions in terms of performance, security, and adaptability. Results The evaluation results illuminate a clear trade‐off among these three dimensions, demonstrating that improving only one aspect often degrades the overall system balance in dynamic environments. Conclusion Finally, this paper introduces critical research limitations and future research directions to provide practical suggestions for effectively deploying blockchain in highly dynamic IoT environments.