Tree-Chain: A Fast Lightweight Consensus Algorithm for IoT Applications

TL;DR

Tree-chain is a scalable, lightweight blockchain algorithm designed for IoT that uses randomization at multiple levels to improve throughput and reduce delays, enabling real-time transactions on low-resource devices.

Contribution

It introduces a novel two-level randomization consensus mechanism and parallel chain structure, enhancing efficiency and scalability for IoT applications.

Findings

Runs efficiently on low-resource devices

Achieves near real-time transaction settlement

Reduces processing overhead compared to traditional blockchains

Abstract

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.