RON-enhanced blockchain propagation mechanism for edge-enabled smart cities

Edge computing can serve latency-sensitive data generated by smart IoT devices in smart cities, which cannot be accommodated by cloud services. However, edge-enabled smart cities applications face many security issues such as massive centralization, vulnerability to tampering, and tracing difficulty. Blockchain, as an emerging ledger technology, can be a useful solution to these problems. However, due to network propagation delay, blockchain fork may occur in the network of edge-enabled smart cities at some time. It can lead to double payment attacks and damage data integrity. To address this issue, this paper proposes a blockchain network propagation mechanism based on the resilient overlay network (RON) for edge-enabled smart cities. Firstly, it reconstructs the networking mode between the blockchain nodes in smart cities based on RON so that the blockchain nodes can quickly detect the link state of the Internet in smart cities. The shortest path algorithm and policy routing are then applied to construct the propagation path between the blockchain nodes to optimize the Gossip propagation mechanism and enhance the QoS and QoE. Simulation results show that the RON-based blockchain network propagation mechanism for edge-enabled smart cities is beneficial in terms of average route hop count, transmission success rate, routing overhead, average delay, and reduced fork probability. Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.