PoRX: A reputation incentive scheme for blockchain consensus of IIoT

Abstract Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) refers to all kinds of equipment in industrial production, whether it is machine equipment in factories or engine in automobiles and airplanes, on which sensors are installed and connected to wireless network terminals to collect and share data. At present, because IIoT system is an open, distributed and heterogeneous system, it is a great challenge to implement trusted communication in IIoT. Blockchain technology has become a new way to solve the cooperative trust issues of industrial Internet of Things. Using blockchain, a tamper-proof system can be built, which can be used as an audit tool for hardware products of industrial Internet of Things from chip to whole equipment. Blockchain improve productivity and operational efficiency of IIoT through smart contract, allowing machines to manage themselves. To apply blockchain technology in IIoT, one of the main issues is to solve the security and efficiency problems of consensus protocols. In this paper, a reputation scheme is proposed to encourage normal nodes and abnormal nodes both to participate in network collaboration in a good way. In order to guide the behavior, a credit based incentive approach is proposed. The reward and punishment factor is designed in the revenue payment function of reputation. The effectiveness is that the cooperative behavior is rewarded, and the non cooperative behavior is punished. The main advantage of our scheme is that our reputation based incentive module can be implemented on state-of-the-art PoX protocols, which is called PoRX,and can make PoX protocols achieve better consensus states. Therefore, it would benefit the applications of IIoT with blockchain. A prototype has been implemented and the experimental results shows that our scheme can effectively encourage the cooperative behavior of the nodes in IIoT, that can benefit the network.