IEEE 802.11AX based medium access design for wireless IOT-blockchain network

Abstract

Blockchain has emerged as a potential solution to security concerns over decentralized networks, and communication is the basic essence of the blockchain network and must be carefully planned while integrating with Internet of Things (IoT). In this work, blockchain nodes are assumed to use wireless channels to communicate among themselves and IoT elements. This work will propose a Medium Access Control (MAC) mechanism for wireless IoT-blockchain system, while addressing transmission latency and throughput. The proposed MAC protocol is based on the widely used IEEE 802.11ax protocol, Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) and works based on M/G/1 queuing model. Blockchainpromises higher security in IoT as it exploits all the nodes in the network to verify a new transaction, thus more contributing nodes indicate higher security. This eventually leads to a larger total delay and less throughput as observed in our results, suggesting a tradeoff on the blockchain usage that must be carefully optimized in practical systems