User-Centric Blockchain for Industry 5.0 Applications

Abstract

The forthcoming Industry 5.0 era reinforces the role of the “human( user )-centric” approach for future technologies, services and applications, where the key objective is to satisfy the quality of service (QoS), security and privacy requirements of each individual user. To meet this objective, blockchain is considered as one of the prime enablers, as it allows secure, reliable, verifiable, and transparent management of private user data. However, contemporary blockchains are not suitable for Industry 5.0 applications due to their inability to ensure high throughput while maintaining reasonable security levels. Hence, in this paper, we design a user-centric sharded blockchain that enables generating, verifying, and storing blocks of data related to individual users with the aim to satisfy their QoS, security and privacy requirements. By analyzing the impact of user allocations to shards on the block period, we devise the user-shard allocation algorithm to minimize the block period or, equivalently, maximize the system throughput, and demonstrate the superior performance of our framework via simulations.