SP-DEWOA: An Evolutionary Distributed Witness Node Election Method for Delegated Proof of Stake

Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) is a widely utilized consensus protocol in blockchain-based Internet of Things (IoT) systems. We propose a heuristic algorithm-based accounting rights allocation method, also referred to as the witness election method, which aims to address the challenges in DPoS. The challenges associated with selected witness nodes that do not reflecting majority stakeholder preferences and susceptibility to manipulation of the vote. This method employs the Kendall’s rank correlation as the fitness function to optimize the arrangement of the top-k producers, thereby maximizing stakeholder preferences. We propose a novel heuristic algorithm, termed SP-DEWOA, which combines the differential evolution algorithm and whale optimization with piecewise chaotic mapping to maximize permutation similarity, i.e., stakeholder preferences. To further improve the efficiency of SP-DEWOA, we parallelize SP-DEWOA based on the Spark-based parallelization design. Experimental results demonstrate that the witness nodes selected through SP-DEWOA are consistent with the preferences of the majority of stakeholders. Furthermore, SP-DEWOA has been proven to have high scalability and resilience against vote manipulation.