A Blockchain Mining Proof of Work Approach Based on Fog Computing Virtualization for Mobile CrowdSensing

The most important and common consensus mechanism in the blockchain is the Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm, which requires a large amount of energy and consumes more time from the miners to reach a single distributed agreement by solving the hard puzzle to append a new block to the blockchain, in addition to the low throughput of accomplishing transactions. The paper proposed a parallel mechanism to implement the proof of work to increase the speed of the mining process by splitting the encryption hash range SHA256 (2$^{256}$) into numerous subranges through utilizing the mobile crowdsensing (MCS) environment and virtualization in fog computing (FC). The fog virtualization-based Proof of Work (FV-PoW) method outperformed other methods and was very productive in the mining process, especially at targets with higher difficulty. To test this, the experimental work was done by making the mining difficulty 9 levels higher to find a difficult target. The mining process took a time of 81.6 sec at level 8 in comparison to the conventional approach, which consumed 6221 sec. At level 9, the solution was not traditionally obtained. Conversely, the suggested approach was able to find the solution within 2043.1 sec. This solution guarantees substantial scalability.