PoTN: A Novel Blockchain Consensus Protocol with Proof-of-Trust Negotiation in Distributed IoT Networks

Jingyu Feng, Xinyu Zhao, Guangyue Lu, Feng Zhao

Abstract: As one of the fundamental characteristics of distributed IoT networks, blockchain has attracted tremendous interests from both the academics and industries. Recently, the key to support distributed IoT networks through blockchain is the consensus protocol with multi-miners selection. However, most of them are fixed-miners based, and thus offering opportunities for attackers to launch DoS attack against the fixed miners or manipulate the creation of blocks by bribing the fixed miners. In this paper, we propose a novel consensus protocol called proof-of-trust negotiation (PoTN). With negotiation rules, trust management is introduced to evaluate the trustworthiness of miners. In this basis, the random-honest miners selection can be achieved by the design of trusted random selection algorithm on the miner team. Simulation results show that PoTN is more effective than traditional consensus protocols in block creation.