Enable Fair Proof-of-Work (PoW) Consensus for Blockchains in IoT by Miner Twins (MinT)

Qian Qu, Ronghua Xu, Yu Chen, Erik Blasch and Alexander Aved
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Qian Qu: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY 13902, USA
Ronghua Xu: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY 13902, USA
Yu Chen: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY 13902, USA
Erik Blasch: The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome, NY 13441, USA
Alexander Aved: The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome, NY 13441, USA

Future Internet, 2021, vol. 13, issue 11, 1-17

Abstract: Blockchain technology has been recognized as a promising solution to enhance the security and privacy of Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge Computing scenarios. Taking advantage of the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus protocol, which solves a computation intensive hashing puzzle, Blockchain ensures the security of the system by establishing a digital ledger. However, the computation intensive PoW favors members possessing more computing power. In the IoT paradigm, fairness in the highly heterogeneous network edge environments must consider devices with various constraints on computation power. Inspired by the advanced features of Digital Twins (DT), an emerging concept that mirrors the lifespan and operational characteristics of physical objects, we propose a novel Miner Twins (MinT) architecture to enable a fair PoW consensus mechanism for blockchains in IoT environments. MinT adopts an edge-fog-cloud hierarchy. All physical miners of the blockchain are deployed as microservices on distributed edge devices, while fog/cloud servers maintain digital twins that periodically update miners’ running status. By timely monitoring of a miner’s footprint that is mirrored by twins, a lightweight Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA)-based detection achieves the identification of individual misbehaved miners that violate fair mining. Moreover, we also design a novel Proof-of-Behavior (PoB) consensus algorithm to detect dishonest miners that collude to control a fair mining network. A preliminary study is conducted on a proof-of-concept prototype implementation, and experimental evaluation shows the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed MinT scheme under a distributed byzantine network environment.

Keywords: digital twin; blockchain; Proof-of-Work; microservices; Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA); byzantine fault tolerance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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