TY - GEN
T1 - Analysis of the communication traffic for blockchain synchronization of IoT devices
AU - Danzi, Pietro
AU - Kalør, Anders Ellersgaard
AU - Stefanović, Čedomir
AU - Popovski, Petar
PY - 2018/7/27
Y1 - 2018/7/27
N2 - Blockchain is a technology uniquely suited to support massive number of transactions and smart contracts within the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, thanks to the decentralized accounting mechanism. In a blockchain network, the states of the accounts are stored and updated by the validator nodes, interconnected in a peer-to-peer fashion. IoT devices are characterized by relatively low computing capabilities and low power consumption, as well as sporadic and low-bandwidth wireless connectivity. An IoT device connects to one or more validator nodes to observe or modify the state of the accounts. In order to interact with the most recent state of accounts, a device needs to be synchronized with the blockchain copy stored by the validator nodes. In this work, we describe general architectures and synchronization protocols that enable synchronization of the IoT endpoints to the blockchain, with different communication costs and security levels. We model and analytically characterize the traffic generated by the synchronization protocols, and also investigate the power consumption and synchronization trade-off via numerical simulations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that rigorously models the role of wireless connectivity in blockchain-powered IoT systems.
AB - Blockchain is a technology uniquely suited to support massive number of transactions and smart contracts within the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, thanks to the decentralized accounting mechanism. In a blockchain network, the states of the accounts are stored and updated by the validator nodes, interconnected in a peer-to-peer fashion. IoT devices are characterized by relatively low computing capabilities and low power consumption, as well as sporadic and low-bandwidth wireless connectivity. An IoT device connects to one or more validator nodes to observe or modify the state of the accounts. In order to interact with the most recent state of accounts, a device needs to be synchronized with the blockchain copy stored by the validator nodes. In this work, we describe general architectures and synchronization protocols that enable synchronization of the IoT endpoints to the blockchain, with different communication costs and security levels. We model and analytically characterize the traffic generated by the synchronization protocols, and also investigate the power consumption and synchronization trade-off via numerical simulations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that rigorously models the role of wireless connectivity in blockchain-powered IoT systems.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85051441798&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICC.2018.8422485
DO - 10.1109/ICC.2018.8422485
M3 - Article in proceeding
AN - SCOPUS:85051441798
SN - 978-1-5386-3181-2
T3 - I E E E International Conference on Communications
BT - 2018 IEEE International Conference on Communications, ICC 2018 - Proceedings
PB - IEEE
T2 - 2018 IEEE International Conference on Communications, ICC 2018
Y2 - 20 May 2018 through 24 May 2018
ER -