Impact of consensus on appendable-block blockchain for IoT

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming our physical world into a complex and dynamic system of connected devices on an unprecedented scale. Connecting everyday physical objects is creating new business models, improving processes and reducing costs and risks. Recently, blockchain technology has received a lot of attention from the community as a possible solution to overcome security issues in IoT. However, traditional blockchains (such as the ones used in Bitcoin and Ethereum) are not well suited to the resource-constrained nature of IoT devices and also with the large volume of information that is expected to be generated from typical IoT deployments. To overcome these issues, several researchers have presented lightweight instances of blockchains tailored for IoT. For example, proposing novel data structures based on blocks with decoupled and appendable data. However, these researchers did not discuss how the consensus algorithm would impact their solutions, i.e., the decision of which consensus algorithm would be better suited was left as an open issue. In this paper, we improved an appendable-block blockchain framework to support different consensus algorithms through a modular design. We evaluated the performance of this improved version in different emulated scenarios and studied the impact of varying the number of devices and transactions and employing different consensus algorithms. Even adopting different consensus algorithms, results indicate that the latency to append a new block is less than 161ms (in the more demanding scenario) and the delay for processing a new transaction is less than 7ms, suggesting that our improved version of the appendable-block blockchain is efficient and scalable, and thus well suited for IoT scenarios. * The first and second authors have the same contribution for the present research.

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“…Any industry including healthcare that needs to use blockchain and its devices should train themselves in these areas to improve it. Such an education can improve patient-centered data [146,147]. The blockchain experiments in this research needs a patient to authorize himself before transferring a record and this could lead to threats.…”

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“…3. Main components of SpeedyChain [20] Figure 3 presents the SpeedyChain data model and its components. Each block (B k ) is composed of two main sections, block header (BH k ), and block ledger (BL k ), where k is the block index.…”

“…Once the block is created, the gateways run the PBFT consensus protocol following the definition presented by Lunardi et al [20]. Only after the consensus is reached, the block is inserted in the blockchain and the permissioned camera is allowed to start the video streaming.…”

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