Unintentional forking analysis in wireless blockchain networks

Abstract

The forking problem plays a key role in the security issue, which is a major concern in the blockchain system. Although many works studied the attack strategy, consensus mechanism, privacy-protecting and security performance analysis, most of them only address the intentional forking caused by a malicious attacker. In fact, without any attacker, unintentional forking still remains due to transmission delay and failure, especially in wireless network scenarios. To this end, this paper investigates the reason for generating unintentional forking and derives the forking probability expression in Wireless Blockchain Networks (WBN). Furthermore, in order to illustrate the unintentional forking on the blockchain system, the performances in terms of resource utilization rate, block generation time, and Transaction Per Second (TPS) are investigated. The numerical results show that the target difficulty of hash algorithm in generating a new block, the delay time of broadcasting, the network scale, and the transmission failure probability would affect the unintentional forking probability significantly, which can provide a reliable basis for avoiding forking to save resource consumption and improving system performance.