An Efficient Lightweight Blockchain for Decentralized IoT

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight, decentralized blockchain platform for IoT that uses a novel PoA consensus algorithm with virtualization and clustering to improve scalability, energy efficiency, and response time.

Contribution

It proposes a new PoA consensus method based on WBS, optimizing validator selection for resource-constrained IoT devices, enhancing scalability and efficiency.

Findings

Reduced energy consumption in blockchain validation

Lower response time compared to traditional methods

Higher throughput in IoT blockchain network

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is applied in various fields, and the number of physical devices connected to the IoT is increasingly growing. There are significant challenges to the IoT's growth and development, mainly due to the centralized nature and large-scale IoT networks. The emphasis on the decentralization of IoT's architecture can overcome challenges to IoT's capabilities. A promising decentralized platform for IoT is blockchain. Owing to IoT devices' limited resources, traditional consensus algorithms such as PoW and PoS in the blockchain are computationally expensive. Therefore, the PoA consensus algorithm is proposed in the blockchain consensus network for IoT. The PoA selects the validator as Turn-based selection (TBS) that needs optimization and faces system reliability, energy consumption, latency, and low scalability. We propose an efficient, lightweight blockchain for decentralizing IoT architecture by using virtualization and clustering to increase productivity and scalability to address these issues. We also introduce a novel PoA based on the Weight-Based-Selection (WBS) method for validators to validate transactions and add them to the blockchain. By simulation, we evaluated the performance of our proposed WBS method as opposed to TBS. The results show reduced energy consumption, and response time, and increased throughput.