A Mechanism to Maintain Node Integrity in Decentralised Systems

Abstract

AbstractThis paper presents a mechanism to maintain node integrity of decentralised systems consisted of nodes or microservices. The mechanism addresses total counts of nodes or micro-services in a decentralised systems. The proposed mechanism is a further development of a decentralised security model named Ki-Ngā-Kōpuku. Decentralised systems where the total number of active nodes matters to maintain the integrity of the system, it is important for the nodes to form a closed group among the valid nodes; as well as be aware of any node that becomes inactive or of any foreign node that may want to join the closed group of nodes. The nodes of a decentralised system need to be aware of the members of other nodes in the same group of nodes, and need to be able to raise alarm in the event of any changes in total number of nodes for whatever is the reason. The mechanism presented in this paper is a proposed solution to maintain integrity of a decentralised system in terms of number of nodes. The mechanism relies on beacon transmission to achieve its goal. The concept of the proposed mechanism applies to other contexts, for example, where a system consists of multiple micro-services.