AirCon: Over-the-Air Consensus for Wireless Blockchain Networks

TL;DR

AirCon is a novel wireless blockchain consensus protocol that leverages over-the-air computation to reduce communication and computational costs by achieving consensus directly in the physical layer, suitable for wireless networks.

Contribution

It introduces a BFT consensus protocol that exploits wireless channel properties for over-the-air consensus, reducing resource consumption compared to traditional methods.

Findings

Feasibility demonstrated through LTE implementation

Performance validated via simulations under various wireless conditions

Significant reduction in communication and computational costs

Abstract

Blockchain has been deemed as a promising solution for providing security and privacy protection in the next-generation wireless networks. Large-scale concurrent access for massive wireless devices to accomplish the consensus procedure may consume prohibitive communication and computing resources, and thus may limit the application of blockchain in wireless conditions. As most existing consensus protocols are designed for wired networks, directly apply them for wireless users may exhaust their scarce spectrum and computing resources. In this paper, we propose AirCon, a byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocol for wireless users via the over-the-air computation. The novelty of AirCon is to take advantage of the intrinsic characteristic of the wireless channel and automatically achieve the consensus in the physical layer while receiving from the end users, which greatly reduces the communication and computational cost that would be caused by traditional consensus protocols. We implement the AirCon protocol integrated into an LTE system and provide solutions to the critical issues for over-the-air consensus implementation. Experimental results are provided to show the feasibility of the proposed protocol, and simulation results to show the performance of the AirCon protocol under different wireless conditions.