Analysis of the Communication Traffic for Blockchain Synchronization of IoT Devices

TL;DR

This paper models and analyzes the communication traffic, power consumption, and synchronization trade-offs for IoT devices connecting to blockchain networks, considering wireless connectivity constraints.

Contribution

It introduces general architectures and protocols for IoT-blockchain synchronization and provides the first rigorous modeling of wireless connectivity's impact on such systems.

Findings

Analytical characterization of synchronization traffic.

Trade-off analysis between power consumption and synchronization efficiency.

Numerical simulations demonstrating protocol performance.

Abstract

Blockchain is a technology uniquely suited to support massive number of transactions and smart contracts within the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, thanks to the decentralized accounting mechanism. In a blockchain network, the states of the accounts are stored and updated by the validator nodes, interconnected in a peer-to-peer fashion. IoT devices are characterized by relatively low computing capabilities and low power consumption, as well as sporadic and low-bandwidth wireless connectivity. An IoT device connects to one or more validator nodes to observe or modify the state of the accounts. In order to interact with the most recent state of accounts, a device needs to be synchronized with the blockchain copy stored by the validator nodes. In this work, we describe general architectures and synchronization protocols that enable synchronization of the IoT endpoints to the blockchain, with different communication costs and security levels. We model and analytically characterize the traffic generated by the synchronization protocols, and also investigate the power consumption and synchronization trade-off via numerical simulations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that rigorously models the role of wireless connectivity in blockchain-powered IoT systems.