Context-based smart contracts for appendable-block blockchains
This work addresses a specific bottleneck for IoT and similar domains by enabling smart contracts in appendable-block blockchains, though it is incremental as it builds on existing blockchain architectures.
The authors tackled the limitation of appendable-block blockchains lacking smart contracts by proposing a context-based model that enables parallel execution, resulting in demonstrated performance improvements in parallel processing scenarios.
Currently, blockchain proposals are being adopted to solve security issues, such as data integrity, resilience, and non-repudiation. To improve certain aspects, e.g., energy consumption and latency, of traditional blockchains, different architectures, algorithms, and data management methods have been recently proposed. For example, appendable-block blockchain uses a different data structure designed to reduce latency in block and transaction insertion. It is especially applicable in domains such as Internet of Things (IoT), where both latency and energy are key concerns. However, the lack of some features available to other blockchains, such as Smart Contracts, limits the application of this model. To solve this, in this work, we propose the use of Smart Contracts in appendable-block blockchain through a new model called context-based appendable-block blockchain. This model also allows the execution of multiple smart contracts in parallel, featuring high performance in parallel computing scenarios. Furthermore, we present an implementation for the context-based appendable-block blockchain using an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Finally, we execute this implementation in four different testbed. The results demonstrated a performance improvement for parallel processing of smart contracts when using the proposed model.