Application-Aware Consensus Management for Software-Defined Intelligent Blockchain in IoT

Currently, IoT has become an important carrier of blockchains, which not only makes blockchain more ubiquitous but also improves the security of IoT. Consensus is the core component of blockchains with various forms, which raises the following challenges. Dynamic management and configuration of the consensuses in a blockchain are required because IoT applications have high dynamics. Moreover, an IoT node is usually reutilized by various applications in different blockchains, which means the IoT node should be switched frequently to cross consensuses in different blockchains. To address this, a software-defined blockchain architecture is proposed to realized the dynamic configurations for blockchains. Then a consensus function virtualization approach with application-aware work flow is proposed, which can abstract and manage various consensus resources. Next, a transfer-learning-based intelligent scheme is designed to implement the application- layer packet analysis and perform the efficient management of virtualized consensus resources. Experiment results indicate the feasibility of the proposed scheme. This work is significant in enhancing the flexibility and extendibility of blockchains in IoT.