ITF: A Blockchain System with Incentivized Transaction Forwarding

The blockchain is introduced as a safe and decentralized technology widely used in cryptocurrencies. It provides a distributed and disintermediation system to securely process and store transactions between peer devices. Traditionally, every transaction in the blockchain is broadcasted throughout the network, which leaves huge computational and communicational overhead to nodes. Nodes may refuse to forward transactions, thereby hindering the consensus of the blockchain. In this paper, we design a blockchain system with Incentive Transaction Forwarding (ITF). ITF allows nodes to share the revenue from transaction fees as the incentive for transaction forwarding. We propose a mechanism keeping the topology updated for computing incentive allocations. We develop an incentive allocation algorithm to distribute revenue among nodes that forward transactions. We analyze the security of ITF and prove that nodes cannot get unfair advantages in our system by common attacks. Extensive simulations show that our system can have fair incentive allocations for relay nodes and against several attacks from adversaries.