A Trust-Based Hierarchical Consensus Mechanism for Consortium Blockchain in Smart Grid

As the smart grid develops rapidly, abundant connected devices offer various trading data. This raises higher requirements for secure and effective data storage. Traditional centralized data management does not meet the above requirements. Currently, smart grid with conventional consortium blockchain can solve the above issues. However, in the face of a large number of nodes, existing consensus algorithms often perform poorly in terms of efficiency and throughput. In this paper, we propose a trust-based hierarchical consensus mechanism (THCM) to solve this problem. Firstly, we design a hierarchical mechanism to improve the efficiency and throughput. Then, intra-layer nodes use an improved Raft consensus algorithm and inter-layer nodes use the Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithm. Thirdly, we propose a trust evaluation method to improve the election process of Raft. Finally, we implement a prototype system to evaluate the performance of THCM. The results demonstrate that the consensus efficiency is improved by 19.8%, the throughput is improved by 12.34%, and the storage is reduced by 37.9%.