LBlockchainE: A Lightweight Blockchain for Edge IoT-Enabled Maritime Transportation Systems

Blockchain can help edge IoT-enabled Maritime Transportation Systems (MTS) in solving its privacy and security problems. In this paper, a lightweight blockchain called LBlockchainE is designed for edge IoT-enabled MTS to guarantee the security of sensor data stored in an edge computing environment. To save the resources of edge servers on ship, a data placement strategy is proposed. To encourage edge servers to positively contribute to storing data generated by sensor devices, storage resource consumption is employed as an influencing parameter, and servers with abundant resources are selected for priority storage. The data placement strategy also takes care of the access delay between servers and selects the nodes with the least access and storage costs as the priority storage choice. LBlockchainE applies the low-energy-consumption characteristics of Proof of Stake to determine the ownership of bookkeeping rights through a small number of competitive calculations and the resources of the node. Experimental results indicate that compared with Ethereum, the consensus mechanism of LBlockchainE consumes less energy and occupies less storage space. On average, the new system uses 1.6% less time and consumes 78% less battery power compared with traditional blockchain systems. In comparison to the random storage, the best storage, and the optimal data storage strategies, the proposed strategy maintains the same message costs.