Analyzing the blockchain mining strategy in Industrial Internet of Things: A game theoretical approach

Deploying Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus based blockchain systems in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) scenarios that rely on wireless channels for data transmission faces new challenges. An IIoT device working in industrial production may participate in the operation of blockchain as a miner. These devices not only need to consume their own computation capability to compete for the right to generate blocks, but also need to transmit newly generated blocks to other devices through wireless channel to continuously maintain the global ledger. Asynchronous mining and data transmission by IIoT devices in wireless environments may significantly interfere with the propagation of blocks in the system and result the reduction of mining payoff, thereby affecting the willingness of IIoT devices to participate in maintaining blockchain system. This paper considers the behavior of independent mining between multiple IIoT devices as a non-cooperative game, which we call the Wireless Mining Game (WMG). Markov chain is adopted to derive the block propagation model under the wireless channel, and then the payoff model of IIoT device is formulated. IIoT devices can make reasonable mining decisions by evaluating the computation capability of other IIoT devices and the probability of successful block transmission. We analyze the Nash equilibrium of the WMG and the corresponding mining behavior set between two-players scenario through theoretical modeling and experiments. We also analyzed the expected mining payoff of the IIoT devices in the multiple devices scenario.