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Register a new userMicrochain: a Light Hierarchical Consensus Protocol for IoT System
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Added by
Yu Chen
Publication date
2019
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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While the large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) makes many new applications feasible, like Smart Cities, IoT also brings new concerns on data reliability, security, and privacy. The rapid evolution in blockchain technologies, which relied on a decentralized, immutable and distributed ledger system for transaction data auditing, provides a prospective solution to address the issues in IoT. The blockchain and smart contract enabled security mechanism for IoT applications have attracted increasing interests from both academia and industry. However, integrating cryptocurrency-oriented blockchain technologies into IoT systems meets tremendous challenges on scalability, storage capacity, security, and privacy. Particularly, the performance of blockchain networks significantly relies on the performance of consensus mechanisms, e.g., in terms of data confidentiality, transaction throughput, and network scalability. In this chapter, given an in-depth review of state-of-the-art blockchain networks, the key matrix of designing consensus mechanism for IoT networks are identified in terms of throughput, scalability, and security. To demonstrate a case study on designing scalable, lightweight blockchain protocols for IoT systems, a Microchain framework is introduced and a proof-of-concept prototype is implemented in a physical network environment. The experimental results verify the feasibility of integrating the Microchain into IoT systems.
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A blockchain and smart contract enabled security mechanism for IoT applications has been reported recently for urban, financial, and network services. However, due to the power-intensive and a low-throughput consensus mechanism in existing blockchain, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, there are still challenges in integrating blockchain technology into resource-constrained IoT platforms. In this paper, Microchain, based on a hybrid Proof-of-Credit (PoC)-Voting-based Chain Finality (VCF) consensus protocol, is proposed to provide a secure, scalable and lightweight distributed ledger for IoT systems. By using a bias-resistant randomness protocol and a cryptographic sortition algorithm, a random subset of nodes are selected as a final committee to perform the consensus protocol. The hybrid consensus mechanism relies on PoC, a pure Proof of stake (PoS) protocol, to determine whether or not a participant is qualified to propose a block, given a fair initial distribution of the credit assignment. The voting-based chain finality protocol is responsible for finalizing a history of blocks by resolving conflicting checkpoint and selecting a unique chain. A proof-of-conception prototype is implemented and tested on a physical network environment. The experimental results verify that the Micorchain is able to offer a partially decentralized, scalable and lightweight distributed ledger protocol for IoT applications.
This paper models a class of hierarchical cyber-physical systems and studies its associated consensus problem. The model has a pyramid structure, which reflects many realistic natural or human systems. By analyzing the spectrum of the coupling matrix, it is shown that all nodes in the physical layer can reach a consensus based on the proposed distributed protocols without interlayer delays. Then, the result is extended to the case with interlayer delays. A necessary and sufficient condition for consensus-seeking is derived from the frequency domain perspective, which describes a permissible range of the delay. Finally, the application of the proposed model in the power-sharing problem is simulated to demonstrate the effectiveness and significance of the analytic results.
Blockchain has received tremendous attention in non-monetary applications including the Internet of Things (IoT) due to its salient features including decentralization, security, auditability, and anonymity. Most conventional blockchains rely on computationally expensive consensus algorithms, have limited throughput, and high transaction delays. In this paper, we propose tree-chain a scalable fast blockchain instantiation that introduces two levels of randomization among the validators: i) transaction level where the validator of each transaction is selected randomly based on the most significant characters of the hash function output (known as consensus code), and ii) blockchain level where validator is randomly allocated to a particular consensus code based on the hash of their public key. Tree-chain introduces parallel chain branches where each validator commits the corresponding transactions in a unique ledger. Implementation results show that tree-chain is runnable on low resource devices and incurs low processing overhead, achieving near real-time transaction settlement.
In recent years, blockchain technology has received unparalleled attention from academia, industry, and governments all around the world. It is considered a technological breakthrough anticipated to disrupt several application domains. This has resulted in a plethora of blockchain systems for various purposes. However, many of these blockchain systems suffer from serious shortcomings related to their performance and security, which need to be addressed before any wide-scale adoption can be achieved. A crucial component of any blockchain system is its underlying consensus algorithm, which in many ways, determines its performance and security. Therefore, to address the limitations of different blockchain systems, several existing as well novel consensus algorithms have been introduced. A systematic analysis of these algorithms will help to understand how and why any particular blockchain performs the way it functions. However, the existing studies of consensus algorithms are not comprehensive. Those studies have incomplete discussions on the properties of the algorithms and fail to analyse several major blockchain consensus algorithms in terms of their scopes. This article fills this gap by analysing a wide range of consensus algorithms using a comprehensive taxonomy of properties and by examining the implications of different issues still prevalent in consensus algorithms in detail. The result of the analysis is presented in tabular formats, which provides a visual illustration of these algorithms in a meaningful way. We have also analysed more than hundred top crypto-currencies belonging to different categories of consensus algorithms to understand their properties and to implicate different trends in these crypto-currencies. Finally, we have presented a decision tree of algorithms to be used as a tool to test the suitability of consensus algorithms under different criteria.
First-generation blockchains provide probabilistic finality: a block can be revoked, albeit the probability decreases as the block sinks deeper into the chain. Recent proposals revisited committee-based BFT consensus to provide deterministic finality: as soon as a block is validated, it is never revoked. A distinguishing characteristic of these second-generation blockchains over classical BFT protocols is that committees change over time as the participation and the blockchain state evolve. In this paper, we push forward in this direction by proposing a formalization of the Dynamic Repeated Consensus problem and by providing generic procedures to solve it in the context of blockchains. Our approach is modular in that one can plug in different synchronizers and single-shot consensus instances. To offer a complete solution, we provide a concrete instantiation, called Tenderbake, and present a blockchain synchronizer and a single-shot consensus algorithm, working in a Byzantine and partially synchronous system model with eventually synchronous clocks. In contrast to recent proposals, our methodology is driven by the need to bound the message buffers. This is essential in preventing spamming and run-time memory errors. Moreover, Tenderbake processes can synchronize with each other without exchanging messages, leveraging instead the information stored in the blockchain.
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