TY - EJOU AU - Ibrahim, Muhammad AU - Jamil, Faisal AU - Lee, YunJung AU - Kim, DoHyeun TI - Blockchain Based Secured Load Balanced Task Scheduling Approach for Fitness Service T2 - Computers, Materials \& Continua PY - 2022 VL - 71 IS - 2 SN - 1546-2226 AB - In recent times, the evolution of blockchain technology has got huge attention from the research community due to its versatile applications and unique security features. The IoT has shown wide adoption in various applications including smart cities, healthcare, trade, business, etc. Among these applications, fitness applications have been widely considered for smart fitness systems. The users of the fitness system are increasing at a high rate thus the gym providers are constantly extending the fitness facilities. Thus, scheduling such a huge number of requests for fitness exercise is a big challenge. Secondly, the user fitness data is critical thus securing the user fitness data from unauthorized access is also challenging. To overcome these issues, this work proposed a blockchain-based load-balanced task scheduling approach. A thorough analysis has been performed to investigate the applications of IoT in the fitness industry and various scheduling approaches. The proposed scheduling approach aims to schedule the requests of the fitness users in a load-balanced way that maximize the acceptance rate of the users’ requests and improve resource utilization. The performance of the proposed task scheduling approach is compared with the state-of-the-art approaches concerning the average resource utilization and task rejection ratio. The obtained results confirm the efficiency of the proposed scheduling approach. For investigating the performance of the blockchain, various experiments are performed using the Hyperledger Caliper concerning latency, throughput, resource utilization. The Solo approach has shown an improvement of 32% and 26% in throughput as compared to Raft and Solo-Raft approaches respectively. The obtained results assert that the proposed architecture is applicable for resource-constrained IoT applications and is extensible for different IoT applications. KW - Load balancing; resource scheduling; task scheduling; Internet of things; blockchain; fitness applications DO - 10.32604/cmc.2022.019534