Block Access Control in Wireless Blockchain Network: Design, Modeling and Analysis

TL;DR

This paper investigates how MAC protocol CSMA/CA impacts blockchain consensus in wireless networks, proposing strategies to reduce forking and improve throughput through a new Block Access Control approach.

Contribution

It introduces novel mining and discard strategies tailored for wireless blockchain networks and designs BAC methods to optimize block scheduling and network performance.

Findings

BAC improves transaction throughput and block utilization.

Proposed strategies reduce blockchain forking in wireless environments.

Trade-offs between throughput and block utilization are characterized.

Abstract

Wireless blockchain network is proposed to enable a decentralized and safe wireless networks for various blockchain applications. To achieve blockchain consensus in wireless network, one of the important steps is to broadcast new block using wireless channel. Under wireless network protocols, the block transmitting will be affected significantly. In this work, we focus on the consensus process in blockchain-based wireless local area network (B-WLAN) by investigating the impact of the media access control (MAC) protocol, CSMA/CA. With the randomness of the backoff counter in CSMA/CA, it is possible for latter blocks to catch up or outpace the earlier one, which complicates blockchain forking problem. In view of this, we propose mining strategies to pause mining for reducing the forking probability, and a discard strategy to remove the forking blocks that already exist in CSMA/CA backoff procedure. Based on the proposed strategies, we design Block Access Control (BAC) approaches to effectively schedule block mining and transmitting for improving the performance of B-WLAN. Then, Markov chain models are presented to conduct performance analysis in B-WLAN. The results show that BAC approaches can help the network to achieve a high transaction throughput while improving block utilization and saving computational power. Meanwhile, the trade-off between transaction throughput and block utilization is demonstrated, which can act as a guidance for practical deployment of blockchain.