Optimized Transaction Processing in Lightweight Distributed Ledger Networks for Internet of Things

Abstract

AbstractThe last decade has witnessed proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices ranging from smart-watches to smart-cities. Concurrently, first distributed ledger technology was introduced and gained significant traction. Blockchain, integrated into the IoT world presents variety of opportunities such as, machine-to-machine automated micro-transactions, trusted dissemination of information in trust-less network environments. There are many potential applications of blockchain technology in Smart City context, such as smart-homes, and smart-grid. However, the obstacles encountered when merging these two emerging technologies are many-fold. IoT devices are ubiquitous, but they have limited resources, while most popular blockchain technologies require a significant amount of computational resources to participate. Recently, there have been novel proposals which adopt lightweight distributed ledger technologies, that would let IoT devices to participate. One such ledger, IOTA’s Tangle, uses a different underlying ledger data-structure, which is a directed-acyclic graph instead of a linked-list as in traditional blockchains. In this work, we have set-up a private, permissioned Tangle network, comprising of Raspberry-Pi devices as full-nodes and as transacting clients. Our previously proposed transaction optimization algorithm is implemented as an Nginx module.KeywordsBlockchainIoTTangleTangoChainDirected acyclic graphPerformance optimization