A novel robust decentralized consensus protocol for secure blockchain-enabled IoT applications

Blockchain has emerged as a promising solution to enhance transparency, trust, and immutability in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, conventional blockchain frameworks suffer from high latency, limited scalability, and vulnerability to strategic voting attacks, which restrict their adoption in real-time IoT systems. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel Reputation-based Voting Trust-aware Protocol (RVTaaP) for secure and efficient blockchain-enabled IoT environments. RVTaaP integrates the InfoMap Community Detection algorithm to assess node credibility and employs a multi-party distributed Threshold Verifiable Random Function (VRF) to randomize leader election, improving both fairness and reliability. Experimental evaluations show that RVTaaP reduces consensus latency by 80.48%, 30.8%, 47.68%, and 55.38% compared to Proof of Work (PoW), Replicated and Fault Tolerant consensus (RAFT), Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), and Blockchain Reputation Based Consensus (BRBC), respectively. Theoretical analysis further confirms its resilience against up to 51% of Byzantine adversaries while minimizing message overhead. Overall, RVTaaP demonstrates superior efficiency, randomness, and reliability, underscoring its suitability for real-time blockchain-based IoT applications.