A DQN-Based Consensus Mechanism for Blockchain in IoT Networks

Abstract

The integration of the blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) systems can effectively guarantee data security in IoT applications. To facilitate the use of blockchain on resource-constrained IoT end devices, we propose RAFT+ with a new leader selection scheme in this article, which is based on the distributed consensus algorithm RAFT. The design of RAFT+ aims at mitigating the imparities between different types of IoT end devices and enabling these devices to allow different types of IoT end devices to participate in block consensus, thus maintaining strong consistency of the blockchain network. The leader selection scheme is generated by a deep${Q}$-Network (DQN), which can make the optimal selection of the leader under various conditions by leveraging the limited system resources as well as balancing the load of the consensus mechanism on multiple IoT end devices. Simulation results show that RAFT+ can enhance the system performance while maintaining the security of the system under high load conditions.