Towards random-honest miners selection and multi-blocks creation: Proof-of-negotiation consensus mechanism in blockchain networks

As one of the fundamental characteristics of blockchain networks, consensus mechanism has attracted tremendous interests from both the academics and industries. Recently, more attention has been paid to the consensus mechanism with fair multi-miners participation. However, most of them are fixed miners based and one-by-one block creation, and thus offering opportunities for attackers to launch DoS attack against the fixed miners or manipulate the blocks creation by bribing the fixed miners. Additionally, one-by-one block creation may result in vast transactions waiting to be confirmed, especially in a large scale of blockchain network. In this paper, we propose a novel consensus mechanism called proof-of-negotiation (PoN). With negotiation rules, trust management is introduced to evaluate the trustworthiness of miners, and thus achieving the random-honest miners selection for a round of block creation. To further improve the efficiency of PoN in creating blocks, parallel multi-blocks creation can be implemented synchronously or asynchronously by dividing the miner team as k groups. Meanwhile, a distributed blocks storage scheme is designed with a map function to alleviate the storage volume caused by massive blocks creation. Simulation results show that PoN is more effective than traditional consensus mechanism in one-by-one block creation and more efficient in creating blocks. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.