An Efficient and Reliable Byzantine Fault Tolerant Blockchain Consensus Protocol for Single-Hop Wireless Networks

• Published in: IEEE transactions on wireless communications Vol. 23; no. 3; p. 1
• Main Authors: Zhang, Li, Zhang, Baoxian, Li, Cheng
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.03.2024; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Blockchain; Byzantine fault tolerance; Communication system security; Consensus protocol; Cryptography; Fault tolerance; Fault tolerant systems; Jamming; Network latency; Protocol; Protocols; Wireless networks; Wireless sensor networks
• ISSN: 1536-1276; 1558-2248
• DOI: 10.1109/TWC.2023.3293709

Consensus protocol is a key technology enabling blockchain to provide secure and trustful services in wireless networks. However, most previous study on blockchain consensus protocols for wireless networks relies on reliable message transmissions and honest leaders. In practice, wireless blockchains inherently suffer from limited physical resources and unreliable wireless channels due to environmental noises and adversary attacks. This paper studies the design of Byzantine fault tolerant consensus protocol for blockchain in single-hop wireless networks subject to signal-to-noise constraint. For this purpose, we propose a low-latency and reliable Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocol LRBP, which incorporates the following three designs: 1) Randomized credit-based block proposer selection, which can prevent adversary corruption and improve the system throughput, 2) Enhanced threshold Boneh-Lynn-Shacham signature based voting mechanism, which can achieve communication-efficient block validity voting by using piggyback-based acknowledgment and criticality-based adaptive channel accessing probability adjustment, and 3) Random linear network coding based batch forwarding, which supports reliable block transmissions. We derive the consensus success probability and consensus time complexity of LRBP. We prove that LRBP simultaneously satisfies the properties of persistence and liveness. It is resistant to the 51% attack, Sybil attack, double-spending attack, and jamming attack. Simulation results show the high efficiency of LRBP as compared with existing work.