Wireless Blockchains: Trade-offs and Future Challenges

Abstract

The low performance of blockchains has been considered as one of the main challenges in deploying blockchains. This blockchain performance has been discussed and analyzed for further improvements, especially in wired blockchains. In wired blockchains, transactions, messages for consensus protocols (CPs), and new blocks are all transmitted through wired links. However, even though wireless blockchains have actively emerged in recent years, most of blockchain works are still focused on wired blockchains. Being different from wired blockchains, transactions, messages for CPs, and new blocks can face the characteristics of wireless communications, such as limited communication resources, path loss, and higher interference. This is highly influential on the performance of wireless blockchains, especially on CPs that play an important role in fault tolerance inside blockchains. In this paper, therefore, we discuss the impacts of communications on wireless blockchains. We then provide trade-offs and future challenges, which need to be newly considered for higher performance in wireless blockchains.