Paper accepted at IEEE 91st Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2020)
JAN 10, 2020
SLPoW: Secure and Low Latency Proof of Work Protocol for Blockchain in Green IoT Networks
Traditional Internet of Things (IoT) system architectures are centralized. Information from the device is sent to be stored on the back-end, where the information is processed and analyzed and then re-connected to the IoT devices. The scalability of centralized systems like this is very limited especially when an abundance of devices could exist on an IoT network in the coming years. From these facts, it is clear that network security may be compromised due to a large number of devices existing on IoT networks. The blockchain is a distributed ledger without any intensive management that can store all transactions which leads to large amounts of blockchain data that increases over time. This problem will be more pronounced with the increasing IoT devices and blockchain use cases involving IoT. IoT devices are for the most part constrained in both energy, storage, and computation, unlikely to be able to store all blockchain data. The current implementation of blockchain is not IoT friendly. Moreover, consensus on the blockchain using Proof of Work (PoW) is infeasible due to the computational constraints. In this paper, we propose a Secure and Low latency Proof of Work (SLPoW) protocol. We also bring the computation of miners onto a Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to improve the processing speeds of computation. We consider our resulting blockchain technology using SLPoW suitable for the evolving Green IoT setting.