Enhancing the performance of permissionless blockchain networks through randomized message-based consensus algorithm

A public blockchain network ensures security, performance, and integrity through its consensus algorithm. However, most public blockchain consensus algorithms require intensive resources such as; energy, CPU, stake, and memory. Further, the incentive mechanisms of most permissionless consensus algorithms are biased towards the miners having the most resources. This paper proposes a novel, resource-efficient, and fair rewarding consensus algorithm called Proof of Fit (PoF). The PoF consensus algorithm replaces the resource-intensive computation in Proof of Work (PoW) with massage-based resource-efficient computation called fitting-competition. We estimated the average computation time by developing a peer-to-peer messaging and computing network. Then we customized a public blockchain simulation framework to assess the performance parameters of the consensus algorithm. We did several experiments and compared the simulation results of PoF with PoW, Proof of Activity (PoA), Proof of Stake (PoS), and Poof of Capacity (PoC). The simulation result shows that the PoF consensus algorithm improves throughput by 1257%, 69%, 35%, and 18%, respectively; besides, it improves security, resource efficiency, and incentive distribution.