A Number of Conceptual Scalable Node-Organizing Multi-Tiered Blockchain Architectures for IoT
Riham Elsaadany, Guy Bégin · 2024
The high volume and rapid pace of transactions generated by IoT devices pose challenges for current blockchain designs, which typically employ flat or two-tiered node organizations. These models often lack the scalability, throughput, and consensus efficiency required for the IoT environment. This study proposes a multi-tiered clustered design concept that enhances blockchain scalability and efficiency. We compare our approach with flat and two-tiered models to demonstrate its viability. Central to our design is a node lookup and message routing mechanism, coupled with a consensus-accelerating protocol. Transaction, block verification, and creation processes involve a logarithmically bounded number of nodes per tier, improving consensus time and scalability as tier levels increase. The design concept maintains a balance between consensus decentralization and node overhead capacity, ensuring scalability and security. This design concept can be implemented using various algorithmic approaches to produce multiple proposed architectures, all leveraging the consensus-accelerating protocol. Simulations performed on one of the architectures provide solid proof of concept, demonstrating improved performance over flat and two-tier models. The proposed mechanisms provide general-purpose scalability, load balancing, node lookup, and message routing solutions, and are application- and consensus-algorithm-agnostic.