A Survey on Consensus Mechanisms and Mining Strategy Management in Blockchain Networks

By Wenbo Wang, Dinh Thai Hoang, Peizhao Hu, Zehui Xiong, Dusist Niyato, Ping Wang, Yonggang Wen, Dong In Kim. IEEE Access, 2018

840 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The past decade has witnessed the rapid evolution in blockchain technologies, which has attracted tremendous interests from both the research communities and industries. The blockchain network was originated from the Internet financial sector as a decentralized, immutable ledger system for transactional data ordering. Nowadays, it is envisioned as a powerful backbone/framework for decentralized data processing and data-driven self-organization in flat, open-access networks. In particular, the plausible characteristics of decentralization, immutability, and self-organization are primarily owing to the unique decentralized consensus mechanisms introduced by blockchain networks. This survey is motivated by the lack of a comprehensive literature review on the development of decentralized consensus mechanisms in blockchain networks. In this paper, we provide a systematic vision of the organization of blockchain networks. By emphasizing the unique characteristics of decentralized consensus in blockchain networks, our in-depth review of the state-of-the-art consensus protocols is focused on both the perspective of distributed consensus system design and the perspective of incentive mechanism design. From a game-theoretic point of view, we also provide a thorough review of the strategy adopted for self-organization by the individual nodes in the blockchain backbone networks. Consequently, we provide a comprehensive survey of the emerging applications of blockchain networks in a broad area of telecommunication. We highlight our special interest in how the consensus mechanisms impact these applications. Finally, we discuss several open issues in the protocol design for blockchain consensus and the related potential research directions.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/01ea88051f84c77a386294fc715a71198d87a9b9

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Citations in the corpus

A Survey of Distributed Consensus Protocols for Blockchain Networks (2019, background): “[21] provides a comprehensive survey of blockchain consensus protocols and an in-depth review of incentive mechanism designs.”
Proof-of-Stake Consensus Mechanisms for Future Blockchain Networks: Fundamentals, Applications and Opportunities (2019, background): “Some PoS protocols where the leader is selected based on the header of the previous block are also vulnerable to grinding attacks [4].”
Privacy-Preserving Blockchain-Based Federated Learning for IoT Devices (2019, methodology): “The consensus protocol is the Algorand which is based on Proof of Stake (PoS) and Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) [49], [50].”
A Survey of Blockchain From the Perspectives of Applications, Challenges, and Opportunities (2019, background): “block to the existing chain by providing the sufficient proof of its effort [48].”
Towards Post-Quantum Blockchain: A Review on Blockchain Cryptography Resistant to Quantum Computing Attacks (2020, background): “There are many consensus protocols [20], being some of the most popular Proof-of-Work (PoW) (used by Bitcoin),”
A Survey on Ethereum Systems Security (2019, methodology): “1) Outsourceable puzzle (29): This vulnerability was reported in [32].”
Blockchain for 5G and Beyond Networks: A State of the Art Survey (2019, background): “strained IoT devices to participate in the blockchain network. Moreover, if all transaction data are stored on chain, the blockchain capacity will become very large to maintain on the chain over time [289]. Networking: Blockchain networking is another issue that also affects the scalability of bloc”
Applications of blockchain in ensuring the security and privacy of electronic health record systems: A survey (2020, neutral): “A number of protocols have been designed to reach consensus among all the distributed nodes before a new block is linked into blockchain ( Wang et al., 2019 ), such as the following: • PoW (Proof of Work) is the consensus mechanism used in Bit-coin.”
A Comprehensive Review of Blockchain Consensus Mechanisms (2021, background): “Hence, the transaction that has been approved through BFT does not require any further mining process [34], [46].”