A Multidimensional Blockchain Framework For Mobile Internet of Things

The adoption of blockchain in the Internet of Things (IoT) has been increasing due to the various benefits that blockchain brings, such as security and privacy. Current blockchain models for mobile IoT assume there are fixed, powerful edge devices capable of providing global communication to all the nodes in the network. However, due to the mobile nature of IoT or network partitioning problems (NPP), nodes can move out of a cell area and split into smaller independent peer-to-peer subnetworks. Existing blockchain structures either do not support the network partitioning problem or have limitations. This paper introduces a multidimensional, graph-based blockchain structure, that utilizes k-dimensional spatiotemporal space, to address the challenges of applying blockchain in mobile networks with limited resources. Experimental results show that a multidimensional blockchain structure can improve scalability and efficiency as the blockchain grows in size, similar to logarithmic growth, and reduce the longest chain length by more than 99.99% compared to the traditional chain-based blockchain structure.