Prof. Xu Zhang served as a guest editor of a IEEE IoT Journal Special Issue with the focus on Joint Cloud and Blockchain Technologies.
Connecting extraordinarily large number of devices to the Internet, the Internet of things (IoT)service providers always upload the massive amount of data generated by these IoT devices to the cloud in efficient, secure and economic ways. However, an IoT framework based on a single cloud suffers from weakness for supporting time-critical IoT applications, security and trust issues, etc., which impede its wide adoption. As a new generation of computing model, Joint cloud computing (a.k.a. JointCloud) is proposed to facilitate developers to customize cross-cloud services by means of “software definition” based on the integration and cooperation among cloud service entities, helping keep the data privacy and improve the service coverage. Moreover, blockchain is perceived as a promising technique to solve the security and trust issues between multi-entities. Nevertheless, there is no consensus towards any schemes or best practices that specify how JointCloud applies to IoT and how blockchain can be embedded into the JointCloud-enabled IoT framework.
More details can be found at http://ieee-iotj.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/SpecialIssueonJointCloudandBlockchainforInternetofThings.pdf