Transaction Throughput Provisioning Technique for Blockchain-Based Industrial IoT Networks

Abstract

The proliferation of the IoT in connected society is rapidly expanding into vertical industry sectors due to the ever-increasing ties amongst businesses and economies. As the number of IoT nodes utilized in a network increases, decentralized network infrastructure, and security provisioning mechanisms, primarily enabled by blockchain-based technologies, become more beneficial. However, blockchain-based IoT networks experience transaction throughput degradation due to the platform's cryptographically-based security features, where negotiating with ledger maintainers for faster processing is a must. Existing transaction processing schemes are mainly geared towards digital currency applications. In overcoming these challenges, a novel feeless transaction processing algorithm is proposed for non-cryptocurrency blockchain-based IoT networks. The proposed algorithm enables ledger maintainers in achieving desired processing throughputs for select transactions found in a miner's transaction pool. A utility function is designed to select transactions from miners' transaction pools to form blocks that add a desired operational value for achieving pre-determined production outputs over blockchain-based networks. Furthermore, the proposed scheme will utilize an aging process to increase the likelihood of selecting transactions with larger miners' transaction pool residence times. The simulation and implementation results show that the proposed methodologies increase the processing throughput of desired transactions while preventing transaction processing starvation.