BAC: A block alliance consensus mechanism for the mine consortium blockchain

Safety is an important issue in the mining industry and the Internet of Things (IoT) plays an important role to enhance the safety of the underground working environment. The IoT is used to transfer data generated by underground sensors to cloud storage for further processing. However, third‐party platforms are often a target for cyber attacks. Serious mining accidents might occur if the data were tampered with. In the overground scenario, the security of trading data is also an important issue. The Mine Consortium Blockchain (MCB) is proposed to solve the above problems. The MCB avoids the risk of centralized storage and enables data security, provenance and transparency by taking advantage of blockchain technology. The MCB platform ensures that only designated participants can process mineral data. Any violation is immutably recorded in the MCB and is easily traced back by other participants. Classical consensus mechanisms as the core technology of the blockchain cannot be directly and appropriately applied to the mining industry. A Block Alliance Consensus (BAC) mechanism, which is suitable for all consortium blockchain scenarios, is proposed to improve the performance of the MCB. In addition, the block structure of the underground sensor data is optimized: the blocks only contain a hash of the sensor data and the data being stored in the cloud. The efficiency of the BAC is demonstrated by simulation experiments where the performance of the BAC consensus mechanism is compared with with the performance of classical consensus mechanisms. The MCB and the BAC consensus mechanism were also implemented on Hyperledger Fabric. Finally the Hyperledger Caliper evaluation tool was used to evaluate the performance of the system.