Towards a Scalable and Trustworthy Blockchain: IoT Use Case

TL;DR

This paper proposes a scalable, trustworthy blockchain architecture tailored for IoT applications, utilizing sharding, oracles, and a lightweight consensus to enhance scalability, trust, and flexibility in IoT environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel blockchain architecture with sharding, oracles, and a lightweight consensus algorithm specifically designed for IoT scalability and trustworthiness.

Findings

Achieves high scalability and flexibility for IoT blockchain applications.

Ensures data reliability and trust through a peer-to-peer oracle network.

Demonstrates significant performance improvements with the proposed architecture.

Abstract

Recently, blockchain has gained momentum as a novel technology that gives rise to a plethora of new decentralized applications (e.g., Internet of Things (IoT)). However, its integration with the IoT is still facing several problems (e.g., scalability, flexibility). Provisioning resources to enable a large number of connected IoT devices implies having a scalable and flexible blockchain. To address these issues, we propose a scalable and trustworthy blockchain (STB) architecture that is suitable for the IoT; which uses blockchain sharding and oracles to establish trust among unreliable IoT devices in a fully distributed and trustworthy manner. In particular, we design a Peer-To-Peer oracle network that ensures data reliability, scalability, flexibility, and trustworthiness. Furthermore, we introduce a new lightweight consensus algorithm that scales the blockchain dramatically while ensuring the interoperability among participants of the blockchain. The results show that our proposed STB architecture achieves flexibility, efficiency, and scalability making it a promising solution that is suitable for the IoT context.