Blockchain-Aided Access Control for Secure Communications in Ad Hoc Networks

A novel blockchain technology aided peer-to-peer connection (P2P)-based access control protocol is proposed for the distributed ad hoc networks. More specifically, the access process conceived can improve the security performance as an explicit advantage of blockchain technology, which is capable of preventing from the security threatens, e.g., being eavesdropped, being tampered, and malicious access imposed by the lack of the authentication center and the nature of the multi-hop routing. Meanwhile, a reasonable punishment mechanism is integrated into the access protocol that reinforces punishment upon the increase of dishonest or malicious node behaviors and hence, is particularly beneficial for the robustness of the long-term systems. Furthermore, a low-complexity match scheme based on competition access (MCA) is utilized for designing the appropriate multi-hop routings, which considers the min-max delay optimization objective. Numerical results demonstrate that the blockchain-aided access control protocol achieves the lower delay in comparison to the conventional first come, first serve access scheme, random access scheme, and the single-hop access scheme, while improving the security performance of access process in ad hoc networks.