An Efficient Lightweight Blockchain for Decentralized IoT

2025-08-26

AI Summary

To address the high computational overhead of traditional consensus mechanisms (e.g., PoW/PoS) and the energy inefficiency, high latency, and poor scalability caused by round-robin validator selection in existing Proof-of-Authority (PoA) schemes for decentralized IoT networks, this paper proposes a lightweight blockchain architecture. The design integrates virtualization and dynamic clustering to enhance system scalability and introduces a novel Weight-Based Selection (WBS) PoA consensus mechanism that dynamically selects validators according to node reputation, resource availability, and network stability. Furthermore, a lightweight protocol is tailored for resource-constrained IoT devices. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to conventional round-robin selection, the proposed approach reduces energy consumption by 32.7%, decreases average latency by 41.5%, and improves throughput by 2.3×, significantly enhancing system reliability and real-time performance—making it highly suitable for large-scale IoT deployments.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Scalability, Parallel & Distributed Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is applied in various fields, and the number of physical devices connected to the IoT is increasingly growing. There are significant challenges to the IoT's growth and development, mainly due to the centralized nature and large-scale IoT networks. The emphasis on the decentralization of IoT's architecture can overcome challenges to IoT's capabilities. A promising decentralized platform for IoT is blockchain. Owing to IoT devices' limited resources, traditional consensus algorithms such as PoW and PoS in the blockchain are computationally expensive. Therefore, the PoA consensus algorithm is proposed in the blockchain consensus network for IoT. The PoA selects the validator as Turn-based selection (TBS) that needs optimization and faces system reliability, energy consumption, latency, and low scalability. We propose an efficient, lightweight blockchain for decentralizing IoT architecture by using virtualization and clustering to increase productivity and scalability to address these issues. We also introduce a novel PoA based on the Weight-Based-Selection (WBS) method for validators to validate transactions and add them to the blockchain. By simulation, we evaluated the performance of our proposed WBS method as opposed to TBS. The results show reduced energy consumption, and response time, and increased throughput.

Problem

• Decentralizing IoT architecture with lightweight blockchain
• Optimizing consensus algorithm for resource-constrained IoT devices
• Reducing energy consumption and latency in IoT networks

Innovation

• Lightweight blockchain using virtualization and clustering
• Weight-Based-Selection PoA consensus algorithm
• Optimized validator selection reducing energy consumption