Ziggurat: A Framework for Providing Scalability and Security in IoT Blockchains

• Published in: 2021 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI) pp. 1548 - 1550
• Main Authors: Glendenning, Brett, Kiefer, Riley, Patel, Ashokkumar
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.12.2021
• Subjects: Authentication; blockchain; Blockchains; Internet of Things; IoT; Performance evaluation; Protocols; Scalability; Scientific computing
• DOI: 10.1109/CSCI54926.2021.00301

As the internet continues to grow, networked devices are expanding not only in number, but variety as well. The Internet of Things presents an opportunity to connect every-day devices in new and intelligent ways, whether those devices are as mundane as kitchen appliances, or as complex as Autonomous Vehicles. To ensure the security of information in these sometimes public-facing, geographically distributed networks, devices cannot trust one another blindly. A Blockchain protocol may be ideal in that it trades trust in individuals for trust in cryptography, but the performance of such protocols can suffer in densely populated networks. To provide a scalable solution to Blockchain implementations IoT networks, this paper proposes a framework that utilizes a hierarchically distributed Blockchain network with horizontal connections between select devices at each layer to balance traffic without creating a single point of failure.