Developing a Secure, Smart Microgrid Energy Market using Distributed Ledger Technologies The ability for the smart microgrid to allow for the independent generation and distribution of electrical energy makes it an attractive solution towards enabling universal access to electricity within developing economies. Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) are being considered as an enabling technology for the secure energy trade market however the high processing, energy and data exchange requirements may make them unsuitable for the Industrial Internet of Things technologies used in the implementation of the microgrid and the limited connectivity infrastructure in developing technologies. This work serves to assess the suitability of DLTs for IIoT edge node operation and as a solution for the microgrid energy market by considering node transaction times, operating temperature, power consumption, processor and memory useage, in addition to mining effort and end user costs.

Communication Aspects of the Integration of Wireless IoT Devices with Distributed Ledger Technology The pervasive need to safely share and store information between devices calls for the replacement of centralized trust architectures with decentralized ones. DLTs are seen as the most promising enabler of decentralized trust, but they still lack technological maturity, and their successful adoption depends on the understanding of the fundamental design tradeoffs and their reflection in the actual technical design. This work focuses on the challenges and potential solutions for an effective integration of DLTs in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT). We first introduce the landscape of IoT applications and discuss the limitations and opportunities offered by DLTs. Then we review the technical challenges encountered in the integration of resourceconstrained devices with distributed trust networks. We describe the common traits of lightweight synchronization protocols, and propose a novel classification rooted in the IoT perspective. We identify the need for receiving ledger information at the endpoint devices, implying a twoway data exchange that contrasts with the conventional uplinkoriented communication technologies intended for IoT systems.