Blockchain-Based Secure Data Transmission Framework for Industrial Internet of Things Applications

Abstract

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments continuously exchange operational data among sensors, programmable logic controllers, edge gateways, cloud platforms, and industrial applications. Although conventional encrypted channels protect data in transit, centralized authentication and storage services still expose IIoT deployments to single points of failure, privileged misuse, record manipulation, and weak cross-organizational trust. This methodology paper proposes a permissioned blockchain-based secure data transmission framework that combines edge-assisted cryptography, smart-contract authorization, immutable audit records, and encrypted off-chain storage. IIoT payloads are encrypted with AES-256-GCM at the edge, signed using ECDSA, and represented on the blockchain only by SHA-256 hashes, timestamps, device identities, access-policy results, and storage pointers. Hyperledger Fabric-style membership management and a crash-fault-tolerant ordering service are used to avoid the computational cost of public-chain mining. A simulation-based evaluation was designed for 50–250 transactions per second under heterogeneous device loads. The modeled results show that the blockchain framework introduces modest overhead at low load but maintains more stable latency and higher sustainable throughput at heavier load than a centralized cloud baseline. At 250 offered transactions/s, the framework achieved 222 transactions/s with 207 ms mean end-to-end latency, compared with 165 transactions/s and 356 ms for the baseline. The design additionally provides explicit resistance to payload tampering, replay, unauthorized access, and audit-log alteration. The framework is therefore suitable as a reproducible methodology for secure, traceable, and scalable IIoT data exchange, while future work should validate it on physical industrial testbeds and real-time control traffic.