Block Access Control in Wireless Blockchain Network Design, Modeling and Analysis
Abstract : Wireless blockchain network is proposed to enable a decentralized and safe wireless networks for various blockchain applications. To achieve blockchain consensus in wireless network, one of the important steps is to broadcast new block using wireless channel. Under wireless network protocols, the block transmitting will be affected significantly. In this work, we focus on the consensus process in blockchain-based wireless local area network (B-WLAN) by investigating the impact of the media access control (MAC) protocol, CSMA/CA. With the randomness of the backoff counter in CSMA/CA, it is possible for latter blocks to catch up or outpace the earlier one, which complicates blockchain forking problem. In view of this, we propose mining strategies to pause mining for reducing the forking probability, and a discard strategy to remove the forking blocks that already exist in CSMA/CA backoff procedure. Based on the proposed strategies, we design Block Access Control (BAC) approaches to effectively schedule block mining and transmitting for improving the performance of B-WLAN. Then, Markov chain models are presented to conduct performance analysis in B-WLAN. The results show that BAC approaches can help the network to achieve a high transaction throughput while improving block utilization and saving computational power. Meanwhile, the trade-off between transaction throughput and block utilization is demonstrated, which can act as a guidance for practical deployment of blockchain.
? When the user wants to modify existing data, it sends a request to the Authentication Agent, which checks the identity of the user.
? The Authentication Agent checks the identity of the user and approves it, as it has a valid key and provides the user with an ID.
? Access control mechanisms have been extensively studied in the literature and successfully deployed but these solutions cannot be applied directly to an IoT infrastructure, as they are complex and do not fit IoT requirements.
? However, the Local Blockchain Manager (LBCM) does not contain an Encryption and Decryption Agent due to the existence of resource-constrained IoT devices, as encryption and decryption algorithms are computationally expensive, which would be unsuitable for the limited resources of IoT devices.
? The forking problem results in the inconsistency of blockchain ledgers among the FNs, then lead to the waste of computational power and security issues, such as “double-spending”.
? Based on the definition, the forking problem will occur when a new block is generated by a FN while the other FNs are in the block backoff or block transmitting states.
? We propose mining strategy and discard strategy to address forking problem and improve the performance of B-WLAN.
? The high computational power consumption is also a serious problem in PoW-based blockchain.
? To address this problem, the authors in propose an auction-based market model to offload the PoW computational tasks to the cloud/fog computing server.
• The main objective of the proposed solution is to build Blockchain Managers (BCMs) for securing IoT access control, as well as allowing for secure communication between local IoT devices.
• In this paper, we have proposed an architecture based on a multi-agent system and used a private distributed blockchain to manage the delivery of lightweight and decentralized IoT secure access control.
• Moreover, our proposed solution uses mobile agent software, which can play a significant role in the reduction of traffic overheads, exemplifying the high level of mobility and intelligence of our solution.
• Therefore, to address these challenges, our proposed solution uses a private blockchain, which provides light and decentralized IoT access control security.
? The block discard rate, block utilization and mining pause probability are the key performance metrics to show the effectiveness of the proposed strategies, which has not been analysed in previous work.
? Based on the proposed strategies, we design four BAC approaches and use Markov chain models to conduct performance analysis in B-WLAN.
? This strategy can work in parallel with mining strategies to improve the overall performance of BWLAN.
? We also make various interesting observations about the impact of blockchain system parameters on the performance trade-off.
? To validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, mathematical models are required to quantitatively study the performance of blockchain.
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