On the Viable Area of Wireless Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) Blockchain Networks

Abstract

Distributed systems are crucial to the full realization of the Internet of Thing (IoT) ecosystem as it mitigates the challenges of trust, security, and scalability associated with the traditional centralized approach. In this paper, we present an analytical modeling framework for Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT)-a consensus method for blockchain in IoT networks. We define the viable area for the wireless PBFT networks which guarantees the minimum number of replica nodes required for achieving the protocol's safety and liveliness. We also present an analytical framework for obtaining the viable area which we later utilize for power optimization. Results show that significant energy saving can be achieved with the utilization of the viable area concept in wireless PBFT networks. The proposed framework can serve as a theoretical guidance for practical PBFT based wireless blockchain network deployment.