An Efficient and Compacted DAG-Based Blockchain Protocol for Industrial Internet of Things

TLDR

Industrial Internet of Things is widely deployed, and blockchain is seen as a promising solution, but existing blockchains suffer from limited throughput. The authors propose an efficient and secure CoDAG‑based blockchain protocol tailored for IIoT. CoDAG organizes blocks into levels and widths, links new blocks to previous levels for a well‑connected channel, confirms transactions deterministically, maintains a simple data structure, and resists attack strategies. Experiments demonstrate that CoDAG achieves 164× Bitcoin’s throughput and 77× Ethereum’s throughput.

Abstract

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been widely used in many fields. Meanwhile, blockchain is considered promising to address the issues of the IIoT. However, the current blockchains have a limited throughput. In this article, we devise an efficient and secure blockchain protocol compacted directed acyclic graph (CoDAG) based on a compacted directed acyclic graph, where blocks are organized in levels and width. New-generated blocks in the CoDAG will be placed appropriately and point to those in the previous level, making it a well-connected channel. Transactions in the network will be confirmed in a deterministic period, and the CoDAG keeps a simple data structure at the same time. We also illustrate the attack strategies by adversary, and it is proved that our protocols are resistant to these attacks. Furthermore, we design a CoDAG-based IIoT architecture to improve the efficiency of the IIoT system. Experimental results show that the CoDAG achieves 164× Bitcoin's throughput and 77× Ethererum's throughput.