MPoC - A Metaheuristic Proof of Criteria Consensus Protocol for Blockchain Network

Abstract

Over the last years, many blockchain platforms opt for Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus protocol for their network deployment. However, using the DPoS, nodes on the network tend to vote for the nodes that are more likely to become block producers after several voting rounds. Hence, with DPoS, the number of block producers is quite small compared to the total number of nodes in the blockchain network. Besides, with DPoS consensus, the distribution of block producers often centralizes into several individual nodes. This paper proposes a novel consensus protocol called Meta-heuristic Proof of Criteria (MPoC) to overcome the disadvantages. Our protocol enables multiple operational criteria to evaluate all blockchain nodes during the block producer selection process. We apply meta-heuristic algorithms to optimize the decentralized level of the node selection based on the set of criteria weights to increase the democracy of the blockchain network.We carry out experiments to evaluate the block producer decentralization of MPoC as compared with DPoS. The achieved results show that our consensus protocol improves the decentralization of block producers as expected. We also show the feasibility of applying different meta-heuristic algorithms to our consensus protocol of blockchain through experiments.