Hybrid Blockchain for IoT—Energy Analysis and Reward Plan

Abstract

Blockchain technology has brought significant advantages for security and trustworthiness, in particular for Internet of Things (IoT) applications where there are multiple organisations that need to verify data and ensure security of shared smart contracts. Blockchain technology offers security features by means of consensus mechanisms; two key consensus mechanisms are, Proof of Work (PoW) and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT). While the PoW based mechanism is computationally intensive, due to the puzzle solving, the PBFT consensus mechanism is communication intensive due to the all-to-all messages; thereby, both may result in high energy consumption and, hence, there is a trade-off between the computation and the communication energy costs. In this paper, we propose a hybrid-blockchain (H-chain) framework appropriate for scenarios where multiple organizations exist and where the framework enables private transaction verification and public transaction sharing and audit, according to application needs. In particular, we study the energy consumption of the hybrid consensus mechanisms in H-chain. Moreover, this paper proposes a reward plan to incentivize the blockchain agents so that they make contributions to the H-chain while also considering the energy consumption. While the work is generally applicable to IoT applications, the paper illustrates the framework in a scenario which secures an IoT application connected using a software defined network (SDN). The evaluation results first provide a method to balance the public and private parts of the H-chain deployment according to network conditions, computation capability, verification complexity, among other parameters. The simulation results demonstrate that the reward plan can incentivize the blockchain agents to contribute to the H-chain considering the energy consumption of the hybrid consensus mechanism, this enables the proposed H-chain to achieve optimal social welfare.

Elastic Trust Management in Decentralized Computing Environments

“…[16] uses the Ethereum platform instead of IoTeX. [17] is another example that adopts independent platform for controlling IoT. Together with our blockchain-based system, the trust analysis of these systems needs dynamism, which is one of the application fields of our theory.…”

A Dynamic Service Trading in a DLT-Assisted Industrial IoT Marketplace

“…4) the DLT becomes a resource that the end services want to purchase to assist trading security. The works that study architecture and resource optimizations of blockchain/DLT assisted IoT [9], [22]- [25] are not directly applicable to solve the problems considered in this paper.…”

“…Hashgraph is particularly appealing because it is designed for fast micro transaction processing in IoT applications. Hashgraph reduces the resource requirement of the consensus mechanism by using an asynchronous Byzantine consensus mechanism instead of Proof-of-Work and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) [9]. The proposed scenario forms a typical supply chain within the economic sphere.…”

Optimization and digitization of wind farms using internet of things : A review

“…4 A proof of work (POW)-based consensus mechanism and the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus mechanisms are good block-chain systems approach which provide excellent trustworthiness in a system that spans organizational boundaries and also allows for private block-chain systems with permission. 24 Using one or both of these systems could help improve the security and privacy lapses accompanying IoT enabled wind farms. Presently, applying block-chain technology directly into energy systems is not possible owing to the paucity of enough computational resources, insufficient bandwidth, and the need for power preservation.…”