Abstract
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.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 8629877 |
Pages (from-to) | 22328-22370 |
Number of pages | 43 |
Journal | IEEE Access |
Volume | 7 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2019 |
Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2013 IEEE.
Funding
This work was supported in part by the Wallenberg AI. Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP)/NTU M4082187 (4080), in part by Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) Tier 1 under Grant 2017-T1-002-007 RG122/17, in part by MOE Tier 2 under Grant MOE2014-T2-2-015 ARC4/15, in part by Singapore National Research Foundation NRF2015-NRF-ISF001-2277, in part by Singapore Energy Market Authority (EMA) Energy Resilience under Grant NRF2017EWT-EP003-041, in part by the Singapore EMA Project NRF2017EWT-EP003-023 and in part by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) Grant funded by the Korean Government under Grant 2017R1A2B2003953. The ASEAN IVO (http://www.nict.go.jp/en/asean_ivo) project Cyberattack Detection and Information Security for Industry 4.0 was also involved in the production of the contents of this work and financially supported by NICT (http://www.nict.go.jp/en/index.html).
Funders | Funder number |
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National Research Foundation Singapore | NRF2015-NRF-ISF001-2277 |
Energy Market Authority of Singapore | NRF2017EWT-EP003-023, NRF2017EWT-EP003-041 |
Ministry of Education - Singapore | MOE2014-T2-2-015 ARC4/15, 2017-T1-002-007 RG122/17 |
Nanyang Technological University | M4082187 (4080 |
National Research Foundation of Korea | 2017R1A2B2003953 |
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology |
Keywords
- Blockchain
- Byzantine fault tolerance
- P2P networks
- block mining
- game theory
- incentive mechanisms
- permissionless consensus