Energy Efficient Offloading Mechanism for Blocks in Blockchain-Assist IoT System

With the development and large-scale application of the Internet of Things (IoT), security issues in IoT systems have received widespread attention. Applying blockchain technology can effectively solve the security risks faced by IoT systems. However, the deployment of blockchain in the IoT system also faces a series of challenges. For example, fast and large-scale data in the IoTs must be stored on the blockchain and maintained by some IoT devices, but constrained IoT devices usually cannot store the complete blockchain. In this regard, we design a strategy for deploying blockchain in the IoT system with limited resources. Specifically, we propose an energy-efficient block offloading strategy to release storage space when the storage resources of IoT devices are exhausted in the long-term dimension. In this process, the offloading of blocks is closely related to the subsequent query process, and a large amount of energy consumption accompanies it. We design a corresponding offloading algorithm by collaboratively considering the block offloading process and the block query process, which can minimize the average energy in the IoT system while satisfying the block storage and data query services. Simulation results show that our proposed offloading algorithm can effectively reduce the total average energy consumption of the system.