Communitychain: Toward a Scalable Blockchain in Smart Home

Abstract

Rapid development of smart homes in recent years has led to the production of an increasing number of smart devices that meet people’s daily needs. However, these smart devices may belong to different vendors and provide different functions and services, making it difficult to apply a centralized solution to a smart home system. Although blockchain has the potential to address the potential problems of smart homes because of its features such as nontampering, decentralization, and security, scalability remains a key challenge when integrating blockchain and smart homes, which is mainly reflected in the horizontal expansion, throughput and latency of the system. To address this challenge, Communitychain—a new scalable blockchain architecture suitable for smart home systems composing heterogeneous devices—is proposed in this study. A community model based on sharding that enables the architecture to adapt to an increase in the number of nodes is designed, which includes new miner nodes and leader node selection algorithms. Efficient cross-shard routing and sideBlock schemes are adopted to improve the throughput and latency and enhance the scalability of the system. Furthermore, lightweight authorization and authentication processes running in each community ensure secure access to device resources. The experimental results indicate that the proposed blockchain architecture can effectively improve the scalability of blockchain-based smart homes and adapt well to the system dynamics.