A cooperative communication scheme based on blockchain

Traditional cooperative communication is based on the complete trust between source and relay, and relay voluntarily helps source to forward information. However, in practice, relay may not be willing to forward information for source, and source may not trust relay due to the tampering or dropping of information. Existing incentive mechanisms that encourage relay to cooperative cannot establish trust foundation between source and relay, and cannot guarantee the security of data transmission. Blockchain naturally has properties of tamper-proof, transparent, and full traceability, it can effectively solve the trust problem and improve the security of data transmission. So we introduce blockchain into cooperative communication, propose a cooperative communication scheme based on blockchain, and design a set of detailed working procedure for this scheme. In the working procedure, we propose an optimal relay selection scheme and a consensus mechanism based on mobile terminal credit value (CM-MTCV) to encourage terminals to cooperation and achieve fast consensus. The simulation results show that our scheme can save 6.74% energy cost compared with the maximum-minimum scheme when the number of relay nodes is 8, the delay of CM-MTCV is 1/2000 of that of PoW, the transaction throughput of CM-MTCV is 2000 times of that of PoW.