An Efficient Blockchain PBFT Consensus Protocol in Energy Constrained IoT Applications
Xiaoqiong Xu, Gang Sun, Hongfang Yu
Abstract
While the Internet of Things (IoT) can support various smart applications, data privacy and security still have been the problems due to a great diversity of IoT devices. Blockchain technology, with distributed, traceable and non-tamperable characteristics, offers opportunities to solve these problems. However, due to the limited energy and computing capability of IoT devices, it is hard to conduct expensive consensus in blockchain systems, especially in PoW based blockchains. In this paper, we propose a high energy efficiency PBFT consensus protocol designed for energy-constrained IoT-blockchain applications. In our proposed PBFT protocol, we design the energy effective consensus node selection mechanism and use the VRF to ensure the security of the leader. Besides, we investigate the node authority by extending the degree of centrality to choose relay nodes in the case of multi-hop neighbor nodes. The simulation results validate that our proposed consensus protocol can cut down the energy consumption as well as can attain high performance.