SLPoW: Secure and Low Latency Proof of Work Protocol for Blockchain in Green IoT Networks

Abstract

Traditional Internet of Things (IoT) system architectures are centralized. Data from the devices are stored on the back-end, where they are processed and analyzed, and then reconnected to IoT devices. The scalability of centralized systems is very limited especially when an abundance of devices exist on an IoT network. Network security in IoT networks is another aspect at stake that could be compromised easily due to the unavailability of security in design mechanisms in most IoT networks. Blockchain technology is a distributed ledger without any intensive management that can store all transactions which leads to large amounts of data that increases over time. Large data amounts will be more pronounced with the increasing IoT devices and blockchain use cases involving IoT. IoT devices are for the most part constrained in both energy, storage, and computation, unlikely to be able to store all blockchain data. The current implementation of blockchain is not IoT friendly. Moreover, consensus on the blockchain using Proof of Work (PoW) is infeasible due to computational constraints. In this paper, we propose a Secure and Low latency Proof of Work (SLPoW) protocol. We also bring the computation of miners onto a Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to improve the processing speeds of computation. We consider our resulting blockchain technology using SLPoW suitable for the evolving Green IoT setting.