SDN-Based Efficient Consortium Blockchain Network Architecture for Grid Information Authentication

Aiming at the problem of communication redundancy and delay for grid information authentication in the existing consortium blockchain network, a new architecture for optimizing the broadcast path by controlling the topology of the consortium blockchain by software defined networking (SDN) is proposed. First, the SDN controller can collect the information and status of nodes in the consortium blockchain network in real time, and make topology adjustments accordingly. Secondly, some existing practices reduce the redundancy and delay brought by the Gossip protocol, but also bring serious computational burden to the nodes. Therefore, our proposed architecture is divided into two layers. The task of adjusting the topology structure is assigned to the upper-SDN controller layer, and the normal operation of the consortium blockchain network is assigned to the lower-blockchain layer, which not only solves the problem of limited computing power of grid information authentication nodes, but also makes the consortium blockchain network flexible, stable and easy to expand. Finally, the simulation results show that the topology adjustment made by SDN effectively reduces the communication redundancy and delay brought by the Gossip protocol in the consortium blockchain network and improves the consensus efficiency.