CartelChain: A Secure Communication Mechanism for Heterogeneous Blockchains

Abstract

In this work, we propose – "CartelChain" – for the secure communication of blockchains (BCs) and achieving opti-mal throughput. With the advancement of BC technology, many industries are adopting it to maintain a secure, immutable, and decentralized system. Industries such as IoT, supply chain, and finance apply BC technology to maintain a decentralized database and automate different activities using smart contracts. However, storing data of different scenarios from the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in separate BCs (multi-chains) leads to isolated data islands. This results in difficulty for these multi-chains to interact with one another efficiently and credibly. For the seamless operation of industries, it is of significant importance to achieve interoperability among different BCs. Toward achieving this, we propose a solution that utilizes smart contracts for enabling data exchange among various BCs. Further, for secure and reliable communication, we use encryption and an access control mechanism that makes the same more credible and reduces the latency compared with multi-chains sharing the data sequentially. Through experimental results, we demonstrate that the proposed method can utilize the resources more efficiently and reduce CPU as well energy usage by 8% and 6%, respectively. Apart from this, the throughput of the proposed method is 900 tps at 200 requests.