Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Blockchain and Edge Computing Techniques for Emerging IoT Applications

With the emergence of 5G, wireless sensor networks, and related technologies, Internet of Things (IoT) has gained prominence as an emerging paradigm to meet the demands of flexible, agile, and ubiquitous accessibility of cyberspace from physical systems. However, the current centralized IoT architecture is heavily restricted by the problems of single points of failure, data privacy, security, and robustness. Recently, blockchains have been found attractive as potential solutions to some of these problems, due to their ability to maintain immutable open ledgers that are accessible to everyone but are tamper-proof. In addition, rapid development of edge computing has enabled a large range of new IoT applications. Edge computing pushes cloud services from the network core to the network edges in closer proximity to IoT devices. Thus, blockchain and edge computing are attractive technologies to meet new and existing challenges by enabling new IoT applications and services through secure, reliable, flexible, and powerful devices and systems while motivating new business models in the growing digital economies. They can provide attractive solutions, such as schemes for decentralized services, service virtualization, rapid resource optimization, and flexible and reliable management and maintenance.