Modeling the Energy Consumption of Blockchain Consensus Algorithms

Abstract

With the development of Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technologies, people find more and more blockchain applications in the IoT domain. While it is reasonable that IoT systems use hierarchical network structures, their sheer large scales may lead to hundreds or even thousands of non-leaf nodes, which may serve as full nodes when participating in IoT blockchains. From IoT blockchain design perspective, it is important to understand the scalability of the energy consumption feature of IoT blockchains. In our research we have collected real-world data that reflect the energy consumption features of several consensus algorithms of blockchain. In this work-in-progress paper, we report our results based on linear regression models. These models provide reference estimations of the energy consumption impact in designing blockchains for IoT systems.