LRD-Raft: Log Replication Decouple for Efficient and Secure Consensus in Consortium-Blockchain-Based IoT

Currently, consortium blockchain has been used in Internet of Things (IoT) systems to ensure secure data sharing across organizations. Consortium blockchain typically uses the Raft algorithm because of its high performance. However, in geo-distributed IoT environments, the single-point overhead problem of leader nodes affects the security and efficiency of consensus due to the high latency and frequency of client requests. To address this challenge, we propose a novel solution: log replication decoupling raft (LRD-Raft), which enables follower nodes to participate in log replication as well. This scheme reduces the overhead of the leader node by delegating part of the log replication task to the follower node. We also propose an adaptive coding protocol that dynamically adjusts the erasure code parameters according to the number of cluster healthy nodes to save the cluster’s network traffic. We evaluated LRD-Raft in different network latency environments and different cluster sizes, and the experimental results show that LRD-Raft has a more extensive performance system compared to Raft in high network latency and large data block transmission environments, and also has a certain level of resistance to DoS attacks, which improves the performance and security of the consensus mechanism.