Improving Computational Efficiency of the TONS algorithm in Selecting Neighbor Agents in Blockchain Trust-based IoT Environments

Blockchain (BC) is increasingly applied to the Internet of Things (IoT) domains to realize decentralized IoT environments where reliable and anonymous activities can be carried out. BCs exploit a distributed ledger, which requires to be continuously synchronized and to maintain a high level of consistency. To allow BCs applied to the IoT of maintaining high levels of reliability in the network and resilience against malicious or fraudulent nodes, in the recent past has been proposed a Trust-based Optimum Neighbor Selection (TONS) algorithm able to find the Minimum Spanning Tree of the agent network with the purpose of selecting those agents which optimize communication and trustworthiness. In this paper, a new version of TONS, named TONS2, has been conceived for agent-based IoT environments to improve the overall efficiency of the TONS algorithm. The results ot the test we performed have confirmed that in terms of consumed resources TONS2 is appreciably more efficient than TONS.