Knowledge Discovery on Blockchains: Challenges and Opportunities

TL;DR

This paper evaluates blockchain consensus methods for distributed event detection in resource-constrained environments, highlighting communication costs and proposing efficient implementations like Distributed Proof-of-Work and Practical Proof-of-Kernel-Work.

Contribution

It introduces a test-suite for analyzing blockchain consensus methods in resource-limited settings and compares their communication and CPU efficiencies, proposing optimized variants.

Findings

Distributed Proof-of-Work reduces CPU usage compared to traditional Proof-of-Work.

Practical Proof-of-Kernel-Work lowers communication costs.

Blockchain can be integrated in low-data-rate scenarios with acceptable latency.

Abstract

We study the applicability of blockchain technology for distributed event detection under resource constraints. Therefore we provide a test-suite with several promising consensus methods (Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Stake, Distributed Proof-of-Work, and Practical Proof-of-Kernel-Work). This is the first work analyzing the communication costs of blockchain consensus methods for knowledge discovery tasks in resource constraint devices. The experiments reveal that our proposed implementations of Distributed Proof-of-Work and Practical Proof-of-Kernel-Work provide a benefit over Proof-of-Work in CPU usage and communication costs. The tests show further that in cases of low data rates, where latencies by mining do not cause harm proposed blockchain implementations could be integrated. However, usage of blockchain requires data broadcasts, which leads to communication overhead as well as memory requirements based on the address list.