TCON - A lightweight Trust-dependent Consensus framework for blockchain

Abstract

The consensus algorithm played a significant role in successful adoption of Blockchain technology. The security of bitcoin blockchain hugely depends on the complexity and reliability of the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus. However, a non-financial application, whose security requirements are less demanding, requires faster operation and so PoW is not suitable for many of the commercial applications. In this paper, we propose a lightweight Trust-dependent Consensus scheme (TCON) for a blockchain based IoT access control framework. TCON ensures that the blocks are added at a faster rate, spending minimal energy compared to PoW based systems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the notion of trust is quantified and used as a means to simplify the consensus problem in blockchain. A comparison of the various metrics to understand the differences in overhead involved suggest that the proposed scheme outperforms other non-trust-based consensus schemes.