Blockchain-based IoT systems can manage IoT devices and achieve a high level of data integrity, security, and provenance. However, incorporating the existing consensus protocols in many IoT systems limits scalability and leads to high computational cost and network latency. We propose a hierar-chical and location-aware consensus protocol for IoI-blockchain applications inspired by the original Raft protocol to address these limitations. The proposed consensus protocol generates the consensus candidate groups based on nodes' individual reputation and distance information to elect the leader in each sub-layer blockchain and uses our threshold signature scheme to reach global consensus. Experimental results show that the proposed consensus protocol is scalable for large IoT applications and significantly reduces the communication cost, network latency, and agreement time by more than 50% compared with the Raft protocol for consensus processing.

翻译：基于区块链的物联网系统能够管理物联网设备，并实现高水平的数据完整性、安全性和可溯源。然而，将现有共识协议集成至许多物联网系统中会限制其可扩展性，并导致高计算成本与网络延迟。受原始Raft协议启发，我们针对物联网-区块链应用提出一种分层且位置感知的共识协议。该协议基于节点的个体信誉与距离信息生成共识候选组，用于选举每个子区块链层的领导者，并采用我们的门限签名方案达成全局共识。实验结果表明，与Raft协议相比，所提共识协议具有面向大规模物联网应用的可扩展性，并将通信成本、网络延迟及共识达成时间显著降低50%以上。