PPoS: An Optimized Consensus Protocol for IoT Devices

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are currently on the rise, with homes and businesses constantly adding and replacing old mechanisms with new, smart IoT devices. How ever, security vulnerabilities are also becoming more apparent as a result and the use of Blockchains can help reduce some aspects of these vulnerabilities. Most of these blockchains are based on private, permissioned architectures, which while are perfect for private solutions, present a new set of problems when applied to public infrastructures. We thus tried to focus on the applications of public blockchains on IoT devices. TinyEVM presents a novel solution to this problem. However TinyEVM is optimized mostly for one-to-one communication, thus having inherent scalability issues. Current consensus protocols for side-chains can be used to solve this problem, but they are either not optimal or have security risks. In this paper we thus propose a novel consensus pro tocol for side-chains, tailored for use in IoT devices in conjunction with TinyEVM which would enable the use of the public blockchain, Ethereum on most IoT devices. Periodic Proof of Stake (PPoS) is a consensus protocol based on Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) but with a Trust model and a focus on minimizing network traffic through performing consensus periodically and multi-casting transactions to selected nodes instead of whis pering. PPoS also provides flexibility to choose between security and energy-efficiency. Traffic, performance and security analysis shows the improvements compared to existing consensus protocols.