Toward Low-Cost and Stable Blockchain Networks
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Envisioned to be the future of distributed systems, blockchain networks have received increasing attentions from both industry and academic research in recent years. However, the blockchain mining process consumes vast amounts of energy, and studies have shown that the amount of energy consumed in Bitcoin mining is almost the same as electricity used in Ireland. To address the high mining energy cost problem of blockchain networks, in this paper, we propose a blockchain mining resources allocation algorithm to reduce the mining cost in PoW-based (proof-of-work-based) blockchain networks. We first provide a systematic study on general blockchain queueing model. In our queueing model, transactions arrive randomly to the queue and served in a batch manner with unknown probability distribution and agnostic to any priority mechanism. Then, we leverage Lyapunov optimization techniques to propose a dynamic mining resources allocation algorithm (DMRA), which is parameterized by a tuning parameter K>0. We show that our algorithm achieves performance-delay tradeoff as [O(1/K), O(K)]. The simulation results also demonstrate the effectiveness of DMRA in reducing the mining cost.
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