BcMON: Blockchain Middleware for Offline Networks

Blockchain is becoming a new generation of information infrastructures. However, the current blockchain solutions rely on a continuous connectivity network to query and modify the state of the blockchain. The emerging satellite technology seems to be a good catalyst to forward offline transactions to the blockchain. However, this approach suffers expensive costs, difficult interoperability, and limited computation problems. Therefore, we propose BcMON, the first blockchain middleware for offline networks. BcMON incorporates three innovative designs: 1) it reduces the costs of offline transactions accessing the blockchain through Short Message Service (SMS), 2) it validates the authenticity of offline cross-chain transactions by two-phase consensus, 3) it supports offline clients to perform complex queries and computations on the blockchains. The prototype of BcMON has been implemented to evaluate the performance of the proposed middleware, which can show its stability, efficiency, and scalability.