A Scalable Raft Consensus for Large-Scale Agricultural Product Traceability

In the face of escalating demands for food safety, blockchain technology has emerged as pivotal tool in enhancing traceability and accountability within the food supply chain. Raft is a consensus mechanism predicated upon voting and is pervasively utilized across diverse domains. Nevertheless, in the agri-food supply chain, numerous participants lead to a large number of consensus-involved nodes. The leader undertakes a huge amount of broadcast communication tasks, resulting in low consensus-reaching efficiency. Also, suppliers may misreport information for self-interest. To address these limitations, this paper proffers a Weighted Two-Hop Raft (WTH-Raft) consensus predicated upon weight apportionment. In this consensus, suppliers are first grouped to achieve two-hop consensuses from the leader to primary suppliers and then to secondary suppliers. Secondly, consensus weights are assigned to suppliers according to their reputation and product quality. This consensus is mainly for agri-food supply chains with numerous suppliers. Simulation experiments show that our proposed WTH-Raft is superior to the comparison methods in terms of delay. This enhanced approach ensures the stability and efficiency of the consensus among the groups.