Verifiable Event Record Management for a Store-Carry-Forward-Based Data Delivery Platform by Blockchain

We propose a novel database management framework for data delivery services based on Store-Carry-Forward (SCF) techniques. The platform we present consists of heterogeneous wireless opportunistic networks of long-range narrowband and short-range broadband communications. We introduce a blockchain-based method by which to verify the record of delivery events on a decentralized network. A new consensus mechanism named proof-of-forwarding (PoF) is proposed to substitute the function of previously proposed proof-of-work (PoW) methods, while significantly improving computational complexities of block generation. Specifically, in our proposal a block is generated exclusively when data delivery agents perform node-to-node direct communication using a short-range high-speed wireless standard to deliver data. We additionally propose a digital signature overlay to prevent malicious nodes from producing fake transactions without any effort to carry data content to recipients. Simulation results show that our blockchain-based framework robustly manages data delivery records, where 97% of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks can be prevented even when half of the entire nodes are assumed to be malicious.