Blockchain Consensus Protocols: State-of-the-art and Future Directions

Abstract

Being the major disruptive technology in current era, Blockchain is becoming the prime choice for researchers and businesses. Consensus layer acts a backbone of any blockchain application; therefore to increase the performance of a blockchain ecosystem one should need to optimize the underlying consensus method. As almost every consensus method implemented in past poses limitations in terms of low scalability, high resource requirements, low decentralization and public-private tradeoff, there is a need to have an effective consensus protocol. Therefore, we presented a literature review of recent consensus protocols to find their applicability in IoT integration in this paper. We also described some future directions based on the literature being analyzed that would intend to serve as an effective guideline for to perform research in order to improve performance of a blockchain system.