Exploring the Mechanisms of Efficiency and Scalability in Blockchain: A Qualitative Study of Distributed Ledger Algorithms in Decentralized Networks in Bintan, Riau Islands

Proof of Proximity: A Fair and Energy-Efficient Consensus Mechanism for Blockchain-Based IoT and Edge Networks

The introduction of blockchain technology has revolutionized decentralized systems. Blockchain enables peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions to be trustworthy and transparent. However, existing traditional consensus mechanisms such as Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) have significant issues regarding computational costs, efficiency, and centralization, which severely limit their adoption in resource-constrained environments. For instance, in an industrial Internet of Things (IoT) network or a smart metering infrastructure, devices operate on strict energy budgets and cannot participate in compute-heavy PoW mining. They also lack the capital to lock up financial stakes for PoS. To address those limitations, randomized consensus mechanisms such as Pure Proof of Stake (PPoS) and Proof of Luck (PoL) were introduced. Yet these methods have issues with fairness, secure randomness generation, and cost efficiency. This paper proposes a new randomized proposer selection mechanism for blockchain consensus called Proof of Proximity (PoP) that enhances unpredictability, fairness, decentralization, and security. PoP replaces cryptographic randomness beacons with transaction-derived entropy and distance minimization. This enables fair, unpredictable proposer selection without relying on Verifiable Random Functions (VRFs), trusted hardware, or stakebased weighting, maintaining low computational overhead. The mechanism is ideal for IoT networks where resource consumption and security are critical. Experimental and comparative analysis results prove that PoP achieves improved fairness, decentralization, security, and low resource consumption, making it suitable for resource-constrained decentralized systems.

EPoLBFT: A Blockchain Consensus Algorithm for Enhancing Privacy, Invulnerability and Trust in IoT System

Elastic Proof-of-Location Byzantine Fault Tolerance is proposed, a privacy-preserving and location-aware blockchain consensus framework for IoT systems that reduces communication overhead and improves consensus efficiency compared with conventional PBFT-based approaches while strengthening resilience against location-based and identity-based attacks.

Insights into Emerging Blockchain Scalability Approaches Through Layer-2 Solutions and Sharding Mechanisms for High Throughput Decentralised Systems

Blockchain technology is a distributed ledger technology that facilitates secure, transparent and decentralised transaction management between peer-to-peer networks without relying on a centralized authority. Despite its potential across various domains, scalability is a primary limitation in the development and evolution of blockchain technology. While Layer-2 execution frameworks and adaptive sharding techniques have shown significant results in overcoming the scalability limitation in blockchain technology, these techniques have generally been studied and developed in isolation. This study presents a comprehensive review of recent blockchain scalability techniques by categorizing these techniques and analyzing their performance characteristics in a comparative manner. The study critically evaluates the techniques in terms of their architecture design, operational mechanisms and performance characteristics while considering the associated trade-offs in terms of computation overhead, storage replication, hardware dependency, scalability degradation for larger node sizes and practical validation. The key insights demonstrate significant heterogeneity in terms of scalability methodologies adopted and environments used for experimentations. Also, enhanced throughput and reduced latency are often coupled with increased architectural complexity. The study highlights the absence of a unified and modular scalability framework capable of coherently integrating execution-layer optimization and shard management. The analytical synthesis presented a framework for understanding existing scalability paradigms and their architectural challenges for decentralised blockchain environments.

Design and Evaluation of a Lightweight Blockchain Framework for Secure Decentralised Energy Trading in Smart Grids

The increasing usage of distributed renewable energy resources has rapidly increased the transition to decentralised smart grids. This is where secure and efficient peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading is crucial. However, conventional blockchain-based energy trading schemes suffer from high computational overhead, communication latency, and limited scalability, making them unsuitable for resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) networks. This research proposes a lightweight blockchain framework that incorporates Hyperledger Fabric with Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus, ZigbeePro communication, and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)-based energy demand forecasting to facilitate secure and intelligent decentralised energy trading. The framework was evaluated using MATLAB/Simulink simulation, NS-3, Hyperledger Fabric, and a Raspberry Pi/ESP32 prototype. The results of the experiment show that the proposed framework achieved an average latency of 48.9 ms, throughput of 185 transactions per second, packet delivery ratio of 97.8 percent, and support for up to 250 IoT nodes while maintaining low energy overhead. The LSTM forecasting model attained an R² of 0.964 with a MAPE of 4.7 percent, delivering accurate demand prediction for intelligent energy allocation. Compared with centralised and Proof-of-Work blockchain models, the proposed framework enhanced communication efficiency, scalability, and security while reducing computational cost. These results demonstrated that integrating lightweight blockchain, low-power communication, and Artificial Intelligence-based forecasting provides a practical and scalable solution for decentralised energy trading for the next-generation smart grids.

H-PBFT: A Hierarchical and Credit-Aware PBFT Consensus Mechanism for Blockchain-Based Intelligent Transportation Systems

Simulation results show that compared with standard PBFT, Q-PBFT, and APBFT, H-PBFT exhibits significant advantages in consensus latency, throughput, and view switching recovery time, and maintains high system robustness even in complex network environments with malicious nodes.

A comprehensive survey on blockchain for the internet of vehicles: security, scalability, and future research directions