Symbiotic PBFT Consensus: Cognitive Backscatter Communications-enabled Wireless PBFT Consensus

Wireless blockchain networks have played an important role in many network scenarios, among which wireless Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus is regarded as one of the most important consensus mechanisms. It enables nodes in wireless networks to reach consistency without any trusted entity. However, due to the instability of wireless communication links, the reliability of the PBFT consensus will be seriously affected. Meanwhile, it is difficult for nodes in wireless scenarios to obtain a timely energy supply. The high-energy-consumption blockchain functions will quickly consume the power of nodes, thus, affecting consensus performance. Fortunately, the symbiotic radio (SR) system enabled by cognitive backscatter communications can provide a solution to the above problems. In SR, the secondary transmitter (STx) transmits messages by modulating its information over the radio frequency (RF) signal of the primary transmitter (PTx) with extremely low energy consumption, and the STx can provide multipath gain to the PTx in return. In our paper, we propose the symbiotic PBFT (S-PBFT) consensus benefited from the mutualistic transmission in SR, which can increase the consensus security by 54.82 %, and save energy consumption by about 10%.