Blockchain Made Wireless
Open AccessKnown as a distributed ledger technology (DLT), blockchain has attracted much attention due to its properties such as decentralization, immutability, traceability, transparency, and its potential of becoming an infrastructure for various applications. Blockchain can empower wireless networks with identity management, data integrity, access control, and high-level security. However, previous studies on blockchain-enabled wireless networks mostly focus on proposing architectures or building systems with popular blockchain protocols. Nevertheless, existing protocols have obvious shortcomings when adopted in a wireless network where nodes have limited physical resources, favor low communication complexity, and encounter wireless-specific problems. In this thesis, we first propose a \textit{General Blockchain System Analytic Framework (GBSAF)} by which existing blockchain systems can be conveniently decoupled, broken down, and efficiently analyzed. Then we propose two complementary wireless blockchain protocols, namely BLOWN and $wChain$. BLOWN (BLOckchain protocol for Wireless Networks) contains a novel consensus protocol named Proof-of-Channel (PoC) leveraging the natural properties of wireless networks. BLOWN is specially designed for single-hop wireless networks under an adversarial SINR model. We formalize BLOWN with the universal composition framework and prove its security properties, namely persistence and liveness against adversarial jamming, double-spending, Sybil attacks, which are also demonstrated by extensive simulation studies. $\mathit{wChain}$ is a blockchain protocol specifically designed for multihop wireless networks that deeply integrates wireless communication properties and blockchain technologies under the realistic SINR model. We adopt a hierarchical spanner as the communication backbone to address medium contention and achieve fast data aggregation within $O(\log N\log\Gamma)$ slots where $N$ is the network size and $\Gamma$ refers to the ratio of the maximum distance to the minimum distance between any two nodes. Besides, $\mathit{wChain}$ employs data aggregation and reaggregation, and node recovery mechanisms to ensure efficiency, fault tolerance, persistence, and liveness. The worst-case time complexity of $\mathit{wChain}$ is upper bounded by $O(f\log N\log\Gamma)$, where $f=\lfloor \frac{N}{2} \rfloor$ is the upper bound of the number of faulty nodes. To validate our design, we conduct both theoretical analysis and simulation studies, and the results demonstrate the nice properties of $\mathit{wChain}$. To conclude, this thesis points to a vast new space for the exploration of blockchain protocols in wireless networks.
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