A Rate-and-Trust-Based Node Selection Model for Block Transmission in Blockchain Networks

Blockchain-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) has been receiving growing attention. However, IoT nodes are usually resources heterogeneous and subject to malicious attacks, such as the intentional delay of block verification and the transmission of invalid blocks. As a result, a random node-selection model for block transmission may lead to a low transmission rate and serious security risk. To solve the problem, this article proposes a rate-and-trust-based node selection model for block transmission. In our model, we calculate the block transmission rate of a node by the latency and connectivity among nodes and its trust value by its historical transmission and verification behaviors. On this basis, we propose a PageRank-based optimization algorithm for node selection that makes a tradeoff between the transmission rate and the security risk. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed model can achieve better performance than the state-of-the-art methods, including Bitcoin network, Ethereum network, and BlockP2P-EP protocol.