TY - GEN
T1 - An Efficient and Secure Node-sampling Consensus Mechanism for Blockchain Systems
AU - Liang, Zhelin
AU - Xu, Hao
AU - Liu, Xiulong
AU - Jiang, Shan
AU - Li, Keqiu
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by the NSFC under Grants 62072221, 62032017.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 IEEE.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - The consensus mechanism plays a pivotal role in guaranteeing the security and consistency of blockchain systems and substantially affects system performance. However, an increasing number of blockchain nodes degrade the consensus performance dramatically because of the high communication complexity in traditional consensus mechanisms. In this paper, we propose NS-consensus, a secure node-sampling blockchain consensus mechanism reducing the communication complexity significantly. The key novelty lies in the sampling of blockchain nodes so that the leader only needs to interact with the sampling nodes in each consensus epoch. However, NS-consensus imposes two challenges in determining an optimal sample size and denying malicious proposals. To address the challenges, we determine the sample size under the constraints of a confidence level and a margin of error to enhance communication efficiency without compromising system security. Furthermore, we design a mechanism to enable the leader to interact with all blockchain nodes in the last consensus phase, ensuring the denial of malicious proposals. The extensive experimental results indicate that NS-consensus outperforms the state-of-the-art with up to 175.1% higher system throughput and 79.9% lower time overhead in the sampling phases.
AB - The consensus mechanism plays a pivotal role in guaranteeing the security and consistency of blockchain systems and substantially affects system performance. However, an increasing number of blockchain nodes degrade the consensus performance dramatically because of the high communication complexity in traditional consensus mechanisms. In this paper, we propose NS-consensus, a secure node-sampling blockchain consensus mechanism reducing the communication complexity significantly. The key novelty lies in the sampling of blockchain nodes so that the leader only needs to interact with the sampling nodes in each consensus epoch. However, NS-consensus imposes two challenges in determining an optimal sample size and denying malicious proposals. To address the challenges, we determine the sample size under the constraints of a confidence level and a margin of error to enhance communication efficiency without compromising system security. Furthermore, we design a mechanism to enable the leader to interact with all blockchain nodes in the last consensus phase, ensuring the denial of malicious proposals. The extensive experimental results indicate that NS-consensus outperforms the state-of-the-art with up to 175.1% higher system throughput and 79.9% lower time overhead in the sampling phases.
KW - Blockchain
KW - Consensus
KW - Sampling
KW - Security
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85152287846&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/MSN57253.2022.00067
DO - 10.1109/MSN57253.2022.00067
M3 - Conference article published in proceeding or book
AN - SCOPUS:85152287846
T3 - Proceedings - 2022 18th International Conference on Mobility, Sensing and Networking, MSN 2022
SP - 371
EP - 378
BT - Proceedings - 2022 18th International Conference on Mobility, Sensing and Networking, MSN 2022
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 18th International Conference on Mobility, Sensing and Networking, MSN 2022
Y2 - 14 December 2022 through 16 December 2022
ER -