Using Trust Measures to Optimize Neighbor Selection for Smart Blockchain Networks in IoT

The blockchain (BC) paradigm is currently modifying all the major Internet of Things (IoT) application domains, giving the opportunity of constructing decentralized environments in which trustful and anonymous activities can be efficiently performed. BC proposes an approach which assures data saved on a distributed ledger (DL) would be continuously synchronized and in such a way the ledger will remain consistent. The DL has the responsibility to maintain a higher level of consistency. Given a connected network, the optimum neighbor selection (ONS) of paths can be obtained by finding the minimum spanning tree of the network. However, none of past approaches proposed in the literature to construct ONS considered the problem of having nodes with low levels of reliability in the network and even malicious or fraudulent nodes, that is a situation very common in an IoT environment. In this article, we propose an optimized BC ONS algorithm, called trust-based ONS (TONS), which allows the miners to communicate with a globally optimized selection of neighbors. The algorithm can also guarantee that these nodes are the most reliable miners. We also describe an experimental simulation campaign we have performed to evaluate the effectiveness and the efficiency of our approach.