Blockchain-based database in an IoT environment: challenges, opportunities, and analysis
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Blockchain-based database in an IoT environment: challenges, opportunities, and analysis Lewis Tseng1 • Xinyu Yao1 • Safa Otoum2
•
Moayad Aloqaily3 • Yaser Jararweh4
Received: 4 September 2019 / Revised: 20 April 2020 / Accepted: 4 June 2020 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies become widely popular recently, the underlying concept—Blockchain—gets unprecedented attentions. One popular usage of Blockchain is a distributed replicated database. In this paper, we present initial studies on the challenges and opportunities of using Blockchain as a database for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. For IoT applications, latency is an important factor, whereas for application developers, consistency is an important property which specifies how the system orders the operations over blocks (that are stored in the Blockchain). However, consistency property of Blockchain-based database is not well studied, especially in the case when network is not synchronized and the system is dynamic—both are typical scenario in an IoT environment. Intuitively, Blockchain is designed to maintain a single ground truth—one can view the Blockchain itself as the order of the blocks that all participants should observe and respect. In most Blockchain designs, the participants will eventually converge to the same chain of blocks. However, there is very few study on the challenges of using Blockchains as a database in an IoT environment. This paper focuses on the enabling technology behind Bitcoin, Bitcoin Backbone Protocol (BBP). We first survey Blockchain-based IoT applications, and identify why it is necessary to use it as a database for IoT applications. Then we explore several reasonable consistency models for BBP-based database, and then show that such a database does not satisfy many consistency models under certain typical IoT environments. Moreover, we use simulation to study how network quality and system dynamic affect consistency. Finally, we propose a simple mechanism to make the BBP-based database satisfy both read-my-write and eventual consistency. Keywords Bitcoin Consistency Partial Synchrony Blockchain Asynchrony Database IoT
1 Introduction Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency system proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto [1] and later gained popularity due to its distributed, fault-tolerant, and tamper-proof characteristics [2, 3]. The core of Bitcoin is based on the notion of & Safa Otoum [email protected]
Blockchain, which is a peer-to-peer ledger system keeping track of all Bitcoin transactions and the order of these transactions. Inspired by the success of Bitcoin, both industry and academia seek to apply Blockchain to other fields like finance, healthcare and Internet-of-Things (IoT). For example, IBM Blockchain and Microsoft Blockchain1
Department of Computer Science, Boston College, Boston, MA, USA
Lewis Tseng [email protected]
2
College of Technological Innovation, Zayed University, Dubai,
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