A Lightweight Blockchain‑Integrated Protocol for Dynamic,

Fault‑Tolerant, and Low‑Latency Communication in Scalable IoT

Wireless Sensor Networks

Hemavathi P.

, Pushpanathan G.

, S. Sumithra

, S. Muthuselvan

A. Swathi

and Syed Zahidur Rashid

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Bangalore Institute of Technology, Bengaluru‑560004, Karnataka,

India

Department of Information Science and Engineering, BMS Institute of Technology and Management, Bengaluru,

Karnataka, India

Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, J.J. College of Engineering and Technology, Tiruchirappalli,

Tamil Nadu, India

Department of Information Technology, KCG College of Technology, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

Department of Computer Science and Engineering MLR Institute of Technology, Hyderabad‑500043, Telangana, India

Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering, International Islamic University Chittagong, Chittagong,

Bangladesh

Keywords: Blockchain‑Enabled IoT, Fault‑Tolerant Communication, Low‑Latency Protocol, Wireless Sensor Networks,

Decentralized Consensus.

Abstract: The fusion of blockchain and WSNs in IoT is promising because of improved trustworthiness,

decentralisation, and fault tolerance. Numerous solutions however do not cope adequately with both fault

tolerance, real time behavior and scalability within dynamic network environments. To this end, in this study,

a lightweight and energy-efficient blockchain-protected communication protocol for the multihop IoT-WSN

structures in a dynamic environment is introduced. The protocol takes advantage of a decentralized consensus

mechanism suitable for low-latency communication, fault discovery, and automatic recovery, so as to

guarantee operation continuance even under node crash/fail-Stop or mobility. Extensive simulation and real-

world testbed results illustrate the framework’s efficiency, delay, throughput, data security, and overhead.

This paradigm fills the existing chasm of secure, scalable and fault-tolerant communication for the future

digital era IoT applications.

1 INTRODUCTION

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly developing

and the deployment of Wireless Sensor Network

(WSN) is being enlarged into a number of areas such

as smart cities, industrial automation, environmental

monitoring, and healthcare. These systems are

highly dependent on the effective and secure

communication protocols to ensure reliability of data,

stability of network and real-time response.

Nevertheless, classic communication mechanisms are

not adapted to raise within IoT ecosystems, which

become more and more complex and dynamic.

Issues such as node failure, energy sensitivity,

latency-aware applications, lack of energy resources,

insecure transmission range and absence of mature

security mechanisms remain the bottlenecks to the

successful performance and reliability of the IoT

architecture based on WSN.

Blockchain techniques developed in the recent

years may bring in notable potential properties

including decentralization, data inalterability, and

tampering resistant transaction records which can be

utilized to boost the security of IoT communications.

However, the combination of blockchain and WSN

does have its challenges – computational overheads,

communication delays, and scalability being some.

In addition, the available blockchain-based IoT

solutions are mainly security-oriented, overlooking

530

P., H., G., P., Sumithra, S., Muthuselvan, S., Swathi, A. and Rashid, S. Z.

A Lightweight Blockchain-Integrated Protocol for Dynamic, Fault-Tolerant, and Low-Latency Communication in Scalable IoT Wireless Sensor Networks.

DOI: 10.5220/0013868700004919

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Research and Development in Information, Communication, and Computing Technologies (ICRDICCT‘25 2025) - Volume 1, pages

530-536

ISBN: 978-989-758-777-1

important performance issues such as fault tolerances

and low-latency communication. The absence of an

integrated framework for both of these dimensions

represents a significant void in the extant literature.

This paper fills this gap by introducing a new

blokchain-secured communication protocol to

support fault-tolerance and low-latency operation in

dynamic IoT-based WSNs. Contrast to previous

works, ours focuses on flexibility, energy saving, and

immediacy with end-to-end secure data process,

relying on light weight consensus protocol. In

addition, the protocol also includes dynamic fault

detection and recovery mechanisms, so that the

protocol can continue to operate if the network is

under unstable or high mobility conditions. Abstract

This paper interweaves the power of the blockchain

technology and the specific requirements of the

contemporary WSNs and moves towards the

formulation of a new breed of robust, scalable and

secure IoT communication infrastructure.

2 PROBLEM STATEMENT

With the growing prevalence of Wireless Sensor

Networks (WSNs) in Internet of Things (IoT)

systems, providing secure, dependable and real-time

communications among these distributed systems

has become a challenging task. The conventional

security models do not provide the decentralization

and the immutability making them safe from

tampering and data breaches, and some current

blockchain-based solutions bring much of the time

delay as well as complexity which are not really

adaptable to WSNs environment with energy and

time sensitive. In addition, the dynamic nature of IoT

deployments, such as frequent mobility of nodes,

unpredictable failures, and varying traffic loads,

makes it even more challenging to provide seamless,

fault-resilient operation. Existing solutions typically

consider each of these problems separately and

seldom consider how fault-tolerance, low latency

communication, and blockchain security can be

combined into an overall lightweight system. This

piecemeal nature is a barrier to creating scalable,

adaptive and practical secure IoT communication

frameworks. Thus, a unified protocol with a strong

blockchain mechanism, and at the same time is

responsive, fault recovery autonomously, and light

resource consumption at dynamic IoT-based WSN

architectures is needed urgently.

3 LITERATURE SURVEY

The integration of blockchain with wireless sensing

devices in IoT systems has opened up a new

dimension in the bid to secure transactions and to

provide non-repudiation and trustless collaboration.

Many research has studied different aspects this

integration, but a common architecture that

combines decentralization, fault tolerance and real-

time remains missing.

Xu et al. (2021) proposed wChain, a lightweight

authentication protocol over blockchain specifically

designed for energy-limited IoT devices. Although

showed to improve the access control, the method

was predominately simulation-based and did not

prove its validity in a complex real environment.

Motivated by similar ideas, Xie et al. (2022)

presented AirCon, which is a consensus protocol

over the air protocol for blockchain-based WSNs to

minimize the communication overhead. But their

approach suffered from synchronization and stability

problems in high-mobility environments. Faisal and

Husnain (2023) investigated lightweight blockchain

frameworks in more depth, but identified a key down

side of low energy efficiency in decentralized node

operations.

Guo et al. tackled the problem of scalability in

blockchain-enabled WSNs. (2023), who proposed a

federated IoT identity verification protocol.

Although the protocol provided security benefits, it

was unable to adapt to real-time, dynamic IoT

systems. In contrast, Luo et al. (2023) and the fact is

that even if the proposal was to integrate blockchain

with cognitive radio for secure spectrum sharing, its

approach had a relatively large overhead due to the

increased complexity of the protocol.

Recent progress in fault tolerance and latency

minimization were also included in the discussion.

Mathur et al. (2024) some of the design

characteristics of a blockchain-secured WSN with an

emphasis on layered security and redundancy were

described. However, the actual protocol lacked

specific standards as it was only a concept. Kumar et

al. (2024) proposed a hybrid blockchain in the context

of smart sensors with no adequate latency under

heavy load production of data. Likewise, Uvarajan

(2024) presented a blockchain-IoT which improves

fault resilience; however, it did not demonstrate how

messages could easily recovered to ensure

continuous communication in environments with

dynamics.

More and more attention is being paid to the

security of blockchain-based WSNs. Kumaresh

(2023) proposed a trust-based protocol for ITS, but it

A Lightweight Blockchain-Integrated Protocol for Dynamic, Fault-Tolerant, and Low-Latency Communication in Scalable IoT Wireless

Sensor Networks

531

was a domain-specific and not general. Alkhfaji

(2023) proposed a blockchain incentive mechanism

to identify rogue nodes in IoT-WSNs, but it was

highly dependent on trusted gateway nodes, and these

could act as single points of failure.

Other donations addressed machine learning and

redundancy in fault detection. Menaria et al. (2020)

utilized AI models to control fault tolerant activity in

WSNs, however they caused high energy

consumption. Savyanavar and Ghorpade (2019)

studied fault tolerance in mobile grids utilizing

predictive model but they do not provide adaptation

in decentralized IoT settings. Lin et al. (2019)

proposed a bipartite graph-based model to control

the communication reliability of IoT; however, the

high computational overhead prevented its

application.

The further contributions regarding secure routing

and optimization appeared to be informative.

Chintalapalli and Ananthula (2018) proposed a

routing model for secure WSNs that did not include

blockchain in their mechanism. There has been a

study on off-line optimization methods for fault-

tolerant communication (Mohan and Ananthula

2019) but these are not appropriate for real time

application. Prasanalakshmi et al. (2011) which were

novel in their time, but presented outdated solutions

that failed to address the most recent developments in

the decentralized security of WSNs.

Energy efficiency and resource management

were also very present. Moridi et al. (2020) focused

on energy aware clustering in fault-tolerant sensor

networks and Azharuddin and Jana (2015) dealt with

delay sensitive routing, however both lacked

blockchain incorporation. Zhang et al. (2017)

presented an energy-efficient task scheduling

mechanism for mobile WSNs, where energy balance

was considered, by suffering zero energy. (2017)

proposed a fault-tolerant MAC layer which however

does not consider the end-to-end security nor the

consensus overhead.

Tong et al. (2020) proposed a distributed cluster-

head model based on monitoring for fault detection;

however, their scheme faced challenges regarding

mobility and scalability. In all of these works, a

common real-time and blockchain-secured com

munication protocol is missing, which is an

important gap in this context and that will be

addressed by this work through an adaptive, fault-

tolerant and latency-optimized framework made for

IoT-based WSNs.

4 METHODOLOGY

The approach builds on the conception,

implementation, and evaluation of an innovative

blockchain-secured communication scheme to deal

with the variable, faulty, and low-latency region of

IoT WSNs. The protocol is designed to work in a

decentralized infrastructure and reduces reliance

upon centralized entities in order to provide trust,

valid data, and real time response. Central to the

system is a lightweight blockchain structure tailored

for resource-constrained sensor nodes. This

blockchain layer will use an adapted energy-aware

consensus method, based on inherent-Proof of

Authority (PoA) and Delegated Byzantine Fault

Tolerance (dBFT) in order to minimize

communication overhead but achieve strong security

guarantee and consensus assurance.

We define the network as a dynamic multi-hop

sensor grid that periodically shares information

regarding its state, including battery levels,

communication signal, and trust -scores. Connected

with these parameters, cluster heads are dynamically

selected via a local consensus to maintain the local

blockchain ledgers and to collect data from their

neighbors. Those cluster heads, also serving as

validator nodes, record sensing data, transmission

records and node status information into a distributed

ledger created using a secure way. The blockchain is

designed to have a very low storage overhead by

composing of a compressed Merkle tree and

lightweight hash operations appropriate for

embedded systems.

Table 1 show the Hardware and

Simulation Testbed Configuration.

The protocol includes a low-latency optimized

routing layer for real time response. This layer

establishes a dynamically adaptive path selection by

taking delay estimation, congestion sensitivity and

link stability into account, thus providing fast re-

routing capability in case of node failure or link

deterioration. At the same time, an integrated fault

detection engine observes packet loss series, no-

message periods and abnormal node that occurs.

When faults are detected the protocol activates a self-

healing process letting traffic to follow alternative

paths or appointing new cluster heads so that

communication does not break without human

intervention.

Figure 1 show the Secure Data

Transmission in IoT Networks Using Blockchain

Authentication.

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COMMUNICATION, AND COMPUTING TECHNOLOGIES

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Table 1: Hardware and simulation testbed configuration.

Componen

Specification / Details

Microcontroller

Platfor

Raspberry Pi 4, Arduino

Uno

Communication

Protocol

IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee)

Consensus

Mechanis

Modified PoA-dBFT

(Ener

-Aware)

Blockchain

Framewor

Custom with Compressed

Merkle Trees

Simulation

Tools

NS-3, MATLAB

Number of

odes

25 (Simulated), 10

(Ph

sical Testbed)

Fault

Injection

Technique

Random Node Shutdown

(30s Intervals)

Figure 1: Secure data transmission in IoT networks using

blockchain authentication.

5 PROTOCOL ARCHITECTURE

The approach is realized through a mix of simulation

and physical prototyping. The simulation phase is

performed in NS-3 and MATLAB to test the

performance in different topologies, mobility, and

fault conditions. Performance is measured through

end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio, energy

consumption, and blockchain transaction delay and

compared with state-of-the-art protocols. For

validation in the real world, a hardware testbed of

Raspberry Pi as well as Arduino based sensor nodes

has been used, wherein a lightweight blockchain

stack is executed with dedicated communication

firmware. This hybrid assessment enables the

systematic benchmarking and refinement of the

protocol both in a controlled and in the wild settings.

Finally, the so-developed methodology offers an

end-to-end perspective that integrates secure

blockchain-based authentication, IoT-WSN energy-

aware communication, resilient recovery from node

failure, and real-time routing designed to meet the

challenging requirements of the IoT-WSN

applications of the day.

6 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The analysis of the proposed BC-SC protocol

showed its outstanding performance in several key

aspects of the IoT-based WSN communications.

Extensive simulation and real world testing showed

that the protocol reduced end-to-end delay

consistently in comparison with baseline models

(traditional Proof-of-Work and centralized

authentication). In case of highly dynamic networks

where nodes mobility and failures occur frequently in

random manner the proposed model was able to keep

the latency more than 40% lower than the traditional

blockchain integrated protocols tested at such

conditions with latency margin of under 120 ms for

most of the tested transmissions.

Also, the incorporation of lightweight consensus

mechanism was a significant improvement in terms

of energy efficiency. Consensus nodes consumed the

added power of less than 12% than that of the non-

consensus nodes, which is an enormous

improvement than other computation bound

algorithms leading to early energy exhaustion. This

optimization enabled the network to support its

function longer, as the average node lifetimes in fault-

prone settings increased by 28%. The DCHE

approach also minimized the unnecessary broadcasts,

which led to the more efficient use of bandwidth with

superior channel utilization during high traffic hours.

The robustness of the protocols the fault-tolerance

of the protocols at multi-hop communications. In

controlled fault injection experiments where random

nodes were intentionally brought down at a fixed

depth – during all when the system detected the fault,

A Lightweight Blockchain-Integrated Protocol for Dynamic, Fault-Tolerant, and Low-Latency Communication in Scalable IoT Wireless

Sensor Networks

533

it could efficiently re-route data using alternative

paths within a few milli-seconds. Consequently, the

PDR is above 95% for all test scenarios

demonstrating that the protocol is robust under

dynamic network environments. In contrast, the

baseline models that do not feature autonomous

recovery mechanisms suffered from up to 23% of

packet drops, highlighting the relevance of fault

management integration.

Table 2 show the

Performance Evaluation of the Proposed Protocol.

Blockchain transaction times in IoT settings,

which are frequently a concern, were maintained

within reason by maximizing block size and clamping

down upon the number of players to include in local

clusters. The average block confirmation time

achieved in the simulation (around 250 ms) was

slightly better than the obtained on the real-world

deployment whose values were slightly higher but

this is mainly due to hardware limitations. But in

exchange, a tradeoff that was deemed acceptable was

made from the security and data integrity point of

view that was brought by the blockchain layer into

play.

Table 2: Performance evaluation of the proposed protocol.

Metric Traditio

nal

Protocol

Blockchai

n-Based

Model

Propo

sed

Mode

Average

Latenc

(

)

260 190 115

Packet

Delivery Ratio

(%)

81.2 91.5 96.4

Energy

Consumption

(mJ/node)

3.45 2.89 2.17

Fault

Recovery

Time (ms)

950 700 310

Block

Confirmation

Time

(

)

610 390 245

The findings shed light on the transferability of

the protocol across different application scenarios.

The system delivered a stable performance profile

regardless of being deployed in a smart agriculture

with widely spaced static nodes, or a high-density

urban environment where frequent sensor handovers

occur. This demonstrates the scalability of the

protocol to many-to-many IoT real world

deployments.

Figure 2 show the Performance metrics

comparison of the proposed protocol with baseline

models.

Figure 2: Performance metrics comparison of the proposed

protocol with baseline models.

These are indeed promising results that confirm

the research hypothesis: a lightweight, blockchain-

secured scheme, integrated with adaptive routing and

autonomous fault management, can significantly

improve the efficiency, dependability, and security of

next-generation IoT-WSN communications. The

scheme resolves the typical decentralization vs.

latency tradeoff, and provides a balanced and

practical solution for the problems of secure IoT

networking.

7 CONCLUSIONS

This work has proposed a new blockchain-secured

communication protocol specifically for the special

requirements such as dynamic, fault tolerant and low

latency of IoT based wireless sensor network (WSN).

To address the drawbacks of the current architectures

of high-latency delay, poor fault scenario adaptability

and less efficient energy consumption, a lightweight

and decentralized architecture, which combines

blockchain technology with intelligent routing/fault

recovering mechanisms, is suggested in this work.

It provides real time responsive without

undermining the security and scalability by

employing an energy conscious consensus algorithm

(CA) and adaptive cluster-head selection mechanism.

Through extensive simulation and real-world

experimentation, we are able to show that the system

far outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of packet

delivery ratio, node longevity, latency and

communication overhead. In addition, the design is

also modular and resource-efficient, so it can be

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applied both to the static and ultra-mobile IoT

environments.

Notably, this research helps to fill the gap

between secure blockchain solutions and the

performance-sensitive requirements of contemporary

WSNs. It shows that it is indeed possible to reconcile

both the decentralized nature of the security

mechanisms and the real time communication

requirements, given the protocol has been thoroughly

designed (purpose-built) respecting the low-level

hardware restrictions that characterizes the typical

IoT devices.

Furthermore, with the growing number of IoT

ecosystems in various mainstream and niche markets

including health care, agriculture, smart

infrastructure etc., there is a growing need for strong,

secure and self-healing communication protocols.

This need is addressed with the proposed framework

providing the means to build stronger and scalable

IoT solutions on trust models provided by blockchain.

This work could be further extended by further

investigating the integration with AI-powered

anomaly detection, cross-chain interoperability and

edge-cloud synergy to achieve more complete system

intelligence and responsiveness.

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