$\mathsf{LightChain}$: A Lightweight Blockchain System for Industrial Internet of Things

TLDR

Blockchain’s high computational, storage, and bandwidth demands clash with the limited resources of IIoT devices, a gap that has received little attention. This work introduces LightChain, a lightweight blockchain designed for power‑constrained IIoT environments. LightChain employs a Synergistic Multiple Proof consensus, a streamlined LightBlock structure, and an Unrelated Block Offloading Filter to reduce resource usage while preserving traceability. Experiments show LightChain cuts computational cost by 60.68% (to 39.32%), speeds block generation by 74.06%, and reduces storage and network usage by 43.35% and 90.55%, respectively.

Abstract

While the intersection of blockchain and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has received considerable research interest lately, the conflict between the high resource requirements of blockchain and the generally inadequate performance of IIoT devices has not been well tackled. On one hand, due to the introductions of mathematical concepts, including Public Key Infrastructure, Merkle Hash Tree, and Proof of Work (PoW), deploying blockchain demands huge computing power. On the other hand, full nodes should synchronize massive block data and deal with numerous transactions in peer-to-peer network, whose occupation of storage capacity and bandwidth makes IIoT devices difficult to afford. In this paper, we propose a lightweight blockchain system called LightChain, which is resource-efficient and suitable for power-constrained IIoT scenarios. Specifically, we present a green consensus mechanism named Synergistic Multiple Proof for stimulating the cooperation of IIoT devices, and a lightweight data structure called LightBlock to streamline broadcast content. Furthermore, we design a novel Unrelated Block Offloading Filter to avoid the unlimited growth of ledger without affecting blockchain's traceability. The extensive experiments demonstrate that LightChain can reduce the individual computational cost to 39.32% and speed up the block generation by up to 74.06%. In terms of storage and network usage, the reductions are 43.35% and 90.55%, respectively.