Shadows: Blockchain Virtualization for Interoperable Computations in IIoT Environments

In this work, we propose Shadows, a virtual blockchain (VC) for achieving parallel consensus and efficient management of data in industries by utilizing BC. Typically, industrial processes involve heterogeneous activities which require real-time consensus, managed execution, isolation, data sharing, accelerated computation, and efficient utilization of various computational resources such as CPU, RAM, and storage. Achieving these in real-time using a single conventional blockchain (BC) leads to the exertion of computational power. To achieve resource-efficient real-time consensus, we virtualize the nodes of the BC network and create different BC for various activities. Further, to virtualize BC and provide better access to data, we propose smart contracts liable for providing a unified view of a single BC, dynamically creating BCs, allocating resources to these, and making communication between the same. Through lab-scale experiments, we demonstrate that Shadows is capable of utilizing the resources efficiently and achieving real-time consensus. In particular, Shadows uses 18% CPU and 92% memory while reducing consensus time by 56%, compared to a single conventional BC. Shadows also accesses the data efficiently by utilizing smart contracts and dynamically balances the load by migrating the virtual nodes. Further, Shadows reduces the number of migrations to make the balance system by 67%.