The combined use of IoT and Blockchain in Logistics: a comparative experiment

In the last decades, thanks to their ubiquitousness, IoT devices have become part of our lives by introducing innovative services that simplify common activities and, therefore, enhance people daily activities and duties. In addition, their usefulness has been further amplified by the combination of the IoT services with various technologies and innovations. For instance, the Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) and the blockchains are supporting the IoT domain with their useful services and properties, e.g., trust and automation, since some years. However, the increasing interest in such a combination and the race towards the most significant innovation in the sector is shifting the focus away from some of the most important issues and questions. One of them regards the usefulness of the adopted technologies and their effectiveness with respect to similar alternative solutions. For example, the most frequently used approach to save data in a DLT foresees the simultaneous use of an off-chain database to store the actual data, and a DLT platform itself to guarantee some properties, e.g. to verify the immutability of such data. Such a common practice is adopted by almost every work on the domain but the real benefits brought by this approach are not usually measured. For this reason, the present paper is focused on an evaluation of two approaches: one based on the combination of DLT and off-chain databases, and the other one based only on the usage of the DLT. A realistic logistics use case has been introduced to compare the performances of each approach.