Scalable On-Chain and Off-Chain Blockchain for Sharing Economy in Large-Scale Wireless Networks

Abstract

In the future sharing economy, billions of underutilized IoT devices will be deployed to enable a powerful and large-scale sharing market that produces economic, environmental, and social benefits. Given the fact that communications in numerous IoT devices through wireless links are unreliable, blockchain technology, as a promising solution, has emerged to achieve reliable and secure sharing services in a decentralized manner. However, applying blockchain in large-scale wireless networks confronts scalability challenges. This motivates us to propose a real-time, trusted data interactive, and fine-grained transaction supportable sharing framework, the core of which is a novel two-layer scaling blockchain design. In the on-chain layer, sharing-oriented sharding is employed to enable secure and efficient processing of macro-transactions on the chain. In the off-chain layer, cross-zone off-chain channels are set up to provide real-time sharing transactions with high-frequency micro-trading scenarios. Finally, a proof-of-concept case study of electric vehicle sharing data is implemented with experimental results to demonstrate the feasibility of our framework.