How Does CSMA/CA Affect the Performance and Security in Wireless Blockchain Networks

Abstract

The impact of communication transmission delay on the original blockchain, has not been well considered and studied since it is primarily designed in stable wired communication environment with high communication capacity. However, in a wireless scenario, due to the scarcity of spectrum resource, a blockchain user may have to compete for wireless channel to broadcast transactions following media access control (MAC) mechanism. As a result, the communication transmission delay may be significant and pose a bottleneck on the blockchain system performance and security. To facilitate blockchain applications in wireless industrial Internet of Things (IIoTs), this article aims to investigate whether the widely used MAC mechanism, carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), is suitable for wireless blockchain networks or not. Based on tangle, as an example to analyze the system performance in term of confirmation delay, transaction per second and transaction loss probability by considering the impact of queueing and transmission delay caused by CSMA/CA. Next, a stochastic model is proposed to analyze the security issue taking into account the malicious double-spending attack. Simulation results provide valuable insights when running blockchain in wireless network, the performance would be limited by the traditional CSMA/CA protocol. Meanwhile, we demonstrate that the probability of launching a successful double-spending attack would be affected by CSMA/CA as well.