Enabling Consistent Sensing Data Sharing Among IoT Edge Servers via Lightweight Consensus

Blockchain offers distinct advantages in terms of data credibility and provenance certification, and its fusion with Internet of Things (IoT) technology holds great promise. Nevertheless, IoT environments are marked by extensive node networks and intricate communication patterns, especially the sensing environment. The conventional blockchain consensus mechanism, hampered by its heavy reliance on computing resources and communication bandwidth, faces difficulties in ensuring seamless data exchange among IoT edge servers. The issues encountered by state-of-the-art Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus include: (i) high communication complexity between nodes; and (ii) the detrimental impact of Byzantine behavior on system performance. To overcome the above problems, we propose the lightweight blockchain consensus called AntB, firstly introducing the concept of sampling into the consensus and significantly reducing the number of participating consensus nodes from <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N$</tex-math></inline-formula> to <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$</tex-math></inline-formula>, which lowers the consensus complexity to <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathbf{2\cdot O(n)+O(N)}$</tex-math></inline-formula>. We design a dynamic reputation mechanism so that Byzantine nodes cannot control the sampling set to affect the activity of the consensus in the long term. When implementing AntB, we address three significant technical challenges: (i) to determine the optimal sample size, we propose a sampling calculation method based on statistical confidence intervals, where the sample size is primarily determined by the chosen confidence level and margin of error; (ii) to prevent Byzantine behavior, we devise a weighted random sampling mechanism utilizing reputation coefficients based on edge servers’ behaviors; and (iii) to maintain consensus activity and consistency after sampling, we propose the consensus mechanism for partial sampling and global verification to avert potential issues. We implement AntB and conduct performance evaluations in a server with 32 cores and 64GB of memory. The evaluation results indicate that, the more nodes participating in the process of consensus, the better the performance of AntB will be. Especially, compared to HotStuff, AntB has a 24.94% higher success rate and Transactions Per Second (TPS) can improve by 102.10% when the number of nodes is 300.