A Hierarchical and Location-aware Consensus Protocol for IoT-Blockchain Applications

Author(s)Guo, Hao
Author(s)Li, Wanxin
Author(s)Nejad, Mark
Date Accessioned2022-06-14T18:37:52Z
Date Available2022-06-14T18:37:52Z
Publication Date2022-05-20
Description© 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. This article was originally published in IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2022.3176607en_US
AbstractBlockchain-based IoT systems can manage IoT devices and achieve a high level of data integrity, security, and provenance. However, incorporating existing consensus protocols in many IoT systems limits scalability and leads to high computational cost and consensus latency. In addition, location-centric characteristics of many IoT applications paired with limited storage and computing power of IoT devices bring about more limitations, primarily due to the location-agnostic designs in blockchains. We propose a hierarchical and location-aware consensus protocol (LH-Raft) for IoT-blockchain applications inspired by the original Raft protocol to address these limitations. The proposed LH-Raft protocol forms local consensus candidate groups based on nodes’ reputation and distance to elect the leaders in each sub-layer blockchain. It utilizes a threshold signature scheme to reach global consensus and the local and global log replication to maintain consistency for blockchain transactions. To evaluate the performance of LH-Raft, we first conduct an extensive numerical analysis based on the proposed reputation mechanism and the candidate group formation model. We then compare the performance of LH-Raft against the classical Raft protocol from both theoretical and experimental perspectives. We evaluate the proposed threshold signature scheme using Hyperledger Ursa cryptography library to measure various consensus nodes’ signing and verification time. Experimental results show that the proposed LH-Raft protocol is scalable for large IoT applications and significantly reduces the communication cost, consensus latency, and agreement time for consensus processing.en_US
SponsorThis work was partially supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under the Grant G2021KY05101, 2021-2024. This research is supported in part by the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation under the Grant No. 2021A1515110286, 2021-2024, the Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Provincial Department of Education under the Grant No. 2022JQ-639, and a Federal Highway Administration grant: “Artificial In-telligence Enhanced Integrated Transportation Management System”, 2020-2023.en_US
CitationH. Guo, W. Li and M. Nejad, "A Hierarchical and Location-aware Consensus Protocol for IoT-Blockchain Applications," in IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, doi: 10.1109/TNSM.2022.3176607.en_US
ISSN1932-4537
URLhttps://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/30993
Languageen_USen_US
PublisherIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Managementen_US
Keywordsblockchainen_US
KeywordsInternet of Thingsen_US
Keywordsconsensus protocolen_US
Keywordsthreshold signature schemeen_US
Keywordshierarchical architectureen_US
TitleA Hierarchical and Location-aware Consensus Protocol for IoT-Blockchain Applicationsen_US
TypeArticleen_US
Files
Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Name:
A Hierarchical and Location-aware.pdf
Size:
3.94 MB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Description:
Main article
License bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
license.txt
Size:
2.22 KB
Format:
Item-specific license agreed upon to submission
Description: