Tornado: Enabling Blockchain in Heterogeneous Internet of Things Through a Space-Structured Approach
Abstract
With the widespread applications of the Internet of Things (IoT), e.g., smart city, business, healthcare, etc., the security of data and devices becomes a major concern. Although blockchain can effectively enhance the network security and achieve fault tolerance, the huge resource consumption and limited performance of data processing restrict its deployments in IoT scenarios. Observing the heterogeneity and resource constraints, we intend to make blockchain accommodate both wimpy and brawny IoT devices. In this article, we present Tornado, a high-performance blockchain system based on space-structured ledger and corresponding algorithms, to enable blockchain in IoT. Specifically, we first design a space-structured chain architecture with novel data structures for promoting the network scalability. To address the huge heterogeneity of IoT, a novel consensus mechanism named collaborative-proof of work is developed. Moreover, we propose the space-structured greedy heaviest-observed subtree (S2GHOST) protocol for improving the resource efficiency of IoT devices. Additionally, a dynamic weight assignment mechanism in S2GHOST contributes to reflect the trustworthiness of data and devices. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Tornado can achieve a maximum throughput of 3464.76 transactions per second. The optimizations of propagation latency and resource efficiency are 68.14% and 30.56%, respectively.
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Limited scalability of blockchain systems is another pressing challenge of blockchain deployments in the smart city.
“Another pressing challenge of blockchain deployments in the smart city is the limited scalability of blockchain systems (Liu et al. 2020).”
From Blockchain technology in the smart city: A bibliometric review (2022) · cites this paper as Liu et al. 2020
To advance IoT-enabled smart cities, blockchain can play a critical role in improving IoT networks, achieving fault tolerance, optimizing resource consumption, and enhancing data processing performance.
“To advance IoT-enabled smart cities, blockchain can play a critical role in improving IoT networks, achieving fault tolerance, optimizing resource consumption, and enhancing data processing performance (Liu et al. 2020).”
From Blockchain technology in the smart city: A bibliometric review (2022) · cites this paper as Liu et al. 2020
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- Authors
- Liu, Y., Wang, K., Qian, K., Du, M., & Guo, S.
- Affiliations
- Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications (CN)
- University of California, Los Angeles (US)
- Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HK)
- Venue
- IEEE Internet of Things Journal
- Published
- 2020-02
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 1273-1286
- ISSN
- 2327-4662 (ISSN-L)
- 2372-2541
- OpenAlex
- W2990026647
- Cited by
- 82
- References
- 41
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 13 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 21 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 1
- FWCI
- 14.31
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- Locations
- IEEE Internet of Things Journal (publishedVersion)
- Rare & Special e-Zone (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Basic Research Program of China (2018YFB1004700)
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (61872195, 61832005, 61572262)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Blockchain Technology in Education and Learning
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
- Keywords
- blockchain, Internet of Things, heterogeneous devices, consensus algorithms, dynamic weighting, resource efficiency, network scalability, transaction throughput, propagation delay, trustworthiness
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