A High-throughput and Secure Coded Blockchain for IoT

TL;DR

This paper addresses the scalability and security challenges of IoT-blockchains by introducing a coded IoT blockchain that uses rateless (raptor) coding and a transaction-prioritization mechanism. It formulates a throughput-optimization problem with block-size, computation, and validation-depth constraints, and proposes a four-stage mining procedure—transaction selection, miner assignment, verification, and encoding—coordinated by a trusted base station. The approach combines per-transaction consensus with linear-time encoding/decoding to enhance throughput and storage efficiency, and it demonstrates superior throughput, decentralization, and security compared to Polyshard and LCB under dynamic IoT conditions. The proposed framework offers practical scalability for IoT deployments by enabling high-rate processing while preserving security and decentralization, thanks to randomized miner assignment, coded storage, and robust verification on raw data.

Abstract

We propose a new coded blockchain scheme suitable for the Internet-of-Things (IoT) network. In contrast to existing works for coded blockchains, especially blockchain-of-things, the proposed scheme is more realistic, practical, and secure while achieving high throughput. This is accomplished by: 1) modeling the variety of transactions using a reward model, based on which an optimization problem is solved to select transactions that are more accessible and cheaper computational-wise to be processed together; 2) a transaction-based and lightweight consensus algorithm that emphasizes on using the minimum possible number of miners for processing the transactions; and 3) employing the raptor codes with linear-time encoding and decoding which results in requiring lower storage to maintain the blockchain and having a higher throughput. We provide detailed analysis and simulation results on the proposed scheme and compare it with the state-of-the-art coded IoT blockchain schemes including Polyshard and LCB, to show the advantages of our proposed scheme in terms of security, storage, decentralization, and throughput.

Figures (11)

• Figure 1: Block coding in the proposed scheme using a systematic raptor code.
• Figure 2: Plot of the reward function $r_{j}(\textbf{v},\textbf{a},f_{j})$.
• Figure 3: The modified robust soliton distribution used in the LT code ($\overline{W}=1000, \delta=0.15, c=0.5)$.
• Figure 4: Storage usage fraction comparison with $N =1000$, $\lambda_{l}=4$, and $\lambda_{e}=10$.
• Figure 6: Throughput versus the number of miners $N$ with the percentage of dishonest miners $\mu=30\%$.