Tree-Chain: A Fast Lightweight Consensus Algorithm for IoT Applications
This addresses the need for efficient, scalable blockchain consensus in IoT applications, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing blockchain concepts with optimizations.
The paper tackles the problem of high computational cost and low throughput in blockchain consensus for IoT by proposing Tree-Chain, a lightweight algorithm that uses randomization and parallel branches, achieving near real-time transaction settlement on low-resource devices.
Blockchain has received tremendous attention in non-monetary applications including the Internet of Things (IoT) due to its salient features including decentralization, security, auditability, and anonymity. Most conventional blockchains rely on computationally expensive consensus algorithms, have limited throughput, and high transaction delays. In this paper, we propose tree-chain a scalable fast blockchain instantiation that introduces two levels of randomization among the validators: i) transaction level where the validator of each transaction is selected randomly based on the most significant characters of the hash function output (known as consensus code), and ii) blockchain level where validator is randomly allocated to a particular consensus code based on the hash of their public key. Tree-chain introduces parallel chain branches where each validator commits the corresponding transactions in a unique ledger. Implementation results show that tree-chain is runnable on low resource devices and incurs low processing overhead, achieving near real-time transaction settlement.