Research on the Inhomogeneous Latency of Block Propagation in the Blockchain-enabled Internet of Ships

With the global maritime industry promoting the development of smart ships, the security and authenticity of data in ship networking must be guaranteed in the future, and blockchain technology can better solve a series of problems in ship networking, so it is applied in ship networking. However, due to the complex technical composition and topology of ship networking, it will cause certain obstacles to the consensus of blockchain. This thesis will analyze and study the impact of block propagation delay on the operation of DPOS consensus mechanism under network heterogeneity. In this paper, we simulate the witness election and the heterogeneous propagation of blocks under the heterogeneity of the network by using MATLAB software to explore the effect of network heterogeneity on the witness election and what degree of network delay will lead to the heterogeneous propagation of blocks. The simulation results are used to explore how network heterogeneity leads to heterogeneous propagation of blocks and the probability of generating a fork in the blockchain, and to summarize the trigger conditions and probabilities of various fork phenomena generated in the blockchain. Finally, this paper briefly looks at the feasible means to suppress the heterogeneous propagation problem of blocks.