Towards A Scalable DAG-based Distributed Ledger for Smart Communities

摘要

In recent years, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has been playing a more and more important role in building trust and security for Internet of Things (IoT). However, the unacceptable performance of the current mainstream DLT systems such as Bitcoin can hardly meet the efficiency and scalability requirements of IoT. In this paper, we propose a scalable transactive smart homes infrastructure by leveraging a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based DLT and following the separation of concerns (SOC) design principle. Based on the proposed solution, an experiment with 40 Home Nodes is conducted to prove the concepts. From the results, we find that our solution provides a high transaction speed and scalability, as well as good performance on security and micropayment which are important in IoT settings. Then, we conduct an analysis and discuss how the new system breaks out the well-known Trilemma, which claims that it is hard for a DLT platform to simultaneously reach decentralization, scalability and security. Finally, we conclude that the proposed DAG-based distributed ledger is an effective solution for building an IoT infrastructure for smart communities.