Biblio

Named Data Network's (NDN) data-centric approach makes it a suitable solution in a networking scenario where there are connectivity issues as a result of the dynamism of the network. Coupling of this ability with the blockchain's well-documented immutable trustworthy-distributed ledger feature, the union of blockchain and NDN in an Internet-of-Battlefield-Things (IoBT) setting could prove to be the ideal alliance that would guarantee data exchanged in an IoBT environment is trusted and less susceptible to cyber-attacks and packet losses. Various blockchain technologies, however, require that each node has a ledger that stores information or transactions in a chain of blocks. This poses an issue as nodes in an IoBT setting have varying computing and storage resources. Moreover, most of the nodes in the IoT/IoBT network are plagued with limited resources. As such, there needs to be an approach that ensures that the limited resources of these nodes are efficiently utilized. In this paper, we investigate an approach that merges blockchain and NDN to efficiently utilize the resources of these resource-constrained nodes by only storing relevant information on each node's ledger. Furthermore, we propose a sharding technique called an Interest Group and introduce a novel consensus mechanism called Proof of Common Interest. Performance of the proposed approach is evaluated using numerical results.

FastChain is a simulator built in NS-3 which simulates the networked battlefield scenario with military applications, connecting tankers, soldiers and drones to form Internet-of-Battlefield-Things (IoBT). Computing, storage and communication resources in IoBT are limited during certain situations in IoBT. Under these circumstances, these resources should be carefully combined to handle the task to accomplish the mission. FastChain simulator uses Sharding approach to provide an efficient solution to combine resources of IoBT devices by identifying the correct and the best set of IoBT devices for a given scenario. Then, the set of IoBT devices for a given scenario collaborate together for sharding enabled Blockchain technology. Interested researchers, policy makers and developers can download and use the FastChain simulator to design, develop and evaluate blockchain enabled IoBT scenarios that helps make robust and trustworthy informed decisions in mission-critical IoBT environment.