Satellite Broadcasting Enabled Blockchain Protocol: A Preliminary Study

Low throughput has been the biggest obstacle of large-scale blockchain applications. During the past few years, researchers have proposed various schemes to improve the systems' throughput. However, due to the inherent inefficiency and defects of the Internet, especially in data broadcasting tasks, these efforts all rendered unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain protocol which utilizes the satellite broadcasting network instead of the traditional Internet for data broadcasting and consensus tasks. An automatic resumption mechanism is also proposed to solve the unique communication problems of satellite broadcasting. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has a lower communication cost and can greatly improve the throughput of the blockchain system. Theoretical estimation of a satellite broadcasting enabled blockchain system's throughput is 6,000,000 TPS with a 20 gbps satellite bandwidth.