New approach to improve power consumption associated with blockchain in WSNs

Nowadays, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are widely used for collecting, communicating, and sharing information in various applications. Due to its limited resources in terms of computation, power, battery lifetime, and memory storage for sensor nodes, it is difficult to add confidentiality and integrity security features. It is worth noting that blockchain (BC) technology is one of the most promising technologies, because it provides security, avoids centralization, and a trusted third party. However, to apply BCs in WSNs is not an easy task because BC is typically resource-hungry for energy, computation, and memory. In this paper, the additional complication of adding BC in WSNs is compensated by an energy minimization strategy, which basically depends on minimizing the processing load of generating the blockchain hash value, and encrypting and compressing the data that travel from the cluster-heads to the base station to reduce the overall traffic, leading to reduced energy per node. A specific (dedicated) circuit is designed to implement the compression technique, generate the blockchain hash values and data encryption. The compression algorithm is based on chaotic theory. A comparison of the power consumed by a WSN using a blockchain implementation with and without the dedicated circuit, illustrates that the hardware design contributes considerably to reduce the consumption of power. When simulating both approaches, the energy consumed when replacing functions by hardware decreases up to 63%.