Performance Evaluation of PoW Blockchain in Wireless Mobile IoT networks

There has been widespread adoption of blockchain in the wireless domain, especially with the growing interest and potential of Internet of Things (IoT). While the properties of blockchain namely trustworthy transactions and decentralization of authority have opened up numerous opportunities, new challenges pertinent to security and performance have emerged in the presence of wireless communications and mobility. Although current literature provides extensive analysis of blockchain networks when connectivity is offered by static and wired links, there has been little attention in the wireless space. Wireless blockchain analysis has been pursued under specific and simplified assumptions which are insufficient for generalized blockchain performance in real world scenarios. Our work tries to fill this gap by covering a large space of blockchain and network based parameters such as the block interval, the number of miners, node mobility, transmission power and network density and present comprehensive performance results obtained using the NS-3 simulator. Among a number of interesting results, our experiments reveal that transaction throughput is greatly influenced by node mobility patterns, a higher percentage of miners is detrimental for blockchain security and wireless network density and power transmission values beyond particular thesholds are required for block transmission behavior similar to the one observed in wired-static blockchain networks preventing randomness due to packet losses.