Improved PBFT Consensus Mechanism Based on Voting Sort Clustering Partition With Group Signature for IoT

The consensus mechanism is crucial to blockchain performance, making it essential to design a mechanism that aligns with the characteristics of the Internet of Things (IoT). This paper focuses on the application of PBFT consensus mechanism in the Internet of things. However, it is found that the current PBFT consensus mechanisms need to address some problems, such as communication overhead, bandwidth occupation and privacy protection. In this paper, we propose a voting sorting clustering mechanism based on group signatures to enhance the PBFT consensus mechanism (IPBFT), ensuring privacy protection between Internet of Things nodes. Finally, the communication efficiency is improved. The voting sorting clustering method reduces the communication probability with the nodes, and decreases the communication overhead and bandwidth occupation. Experimental results show that compared with other mechanisms, the proposed mechanism increases throughput, reduces communication overhead and bandwidth occupation, and alleviates privacy protection problems.