BcMON: Blockchain Middleware for Offline Networks

TL;DR

BcMON is a novel blockchain middleware enabling offline transactions via SMS, ensuring secure cross-chain validation and supporting complex queries, thus addressing connectivity and cost issues in offline networks.

Contribution

It introduces the first middleware for offline blockchain networks, reducing costs, validating cross-chain transactions securely, and enabling offline clients to perform complex blockchain operations.

Findings

Demonstrates stability, efficiency, and scalability of BcMON

Reduces offline transaction costs significantly

Supports complex queries and computations offline

Abstract

Blockchain is becoming a new generation of information infrastructures. However, the current blockchain solutions rely on a continuous connectivity network to query and modify the state of the blockchain. The emerging satellite technology seems to be a good catalyst to forward offline transactions to the blockchain. However, this approach suffers expensive costs, difficult interoperability, and limited computation problems. Therefore, we propose BcMON, the first blockchain middleware for offline networks. BcMON incorporates three innovative designs: 1) it reduces the costs of offline transactions accessing the blockchain through Short Message Service (SMS), 2) it validates the authenticity of offline cross-chain transactions by two-phase consensus, 3) it supports offline clients to perform complex queries and computations on the blockchains. The prototype of BcMON has been implemented to evaluate the performance of the proposed middleware, which can show its stability, efficiency, and scalability.