Improved Consensus Protocol for IoT Trust Management Systems

Abstract

With the rapid development of the internet of things (IoT), the security collaboration between devices poses higher demands on traditional trust management. Blockchain technology, due to its decentralisation and tamper-proof characteristics, has become an effective solution for building trustworthy IoT systems. However, traditional consensus protocols (like PBFT) face issues such as high communication overhead and insufficient scalability in IoT environments. In response, an improved consensus protocol, Improved Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (IPBFT), is proposed, which combines K-means to optimise node grouping, reducing network communication complexity, while also introducing a dynamic credit assessment mechanism to evaluate the trustworthiness of nodes and filter reliable consensus nodes. Finally, based on these two improvements, a trust system for IoT based on Hyperledger Fabric is designed and implemented. Experimental results show that compared to traditional PBFT, IPBFT reduces latency and communication complexity by over 50%, making it more suitable for large-scale IoT trust management scenarios and providing a new technical approach for efficient and trustworthy collaboration in blockchain applications within the IoT.