Optimal AoI-Based Block Propagation and Incentive Mechanism for Blockchain Networks in Web 3.0

Web 3.0 is regarded as a revolutionary paradigm that enables users to securely manage data without a centralized authority. Blockchains, which enable data to be managed in a decentralized and transparent manner, are key technologies for achieving Web 3.0 goals. However, blockchain-based Web 3.0 is still in its infancy, such as ensuring block freshness and optimizing block propagation to improve blockchain performance. In this paper, we develop a freshness-aware block propagation optimization framework for Web 3.0. We first propose a novel metric called Age of Block Information (AoBI) based on the concept of age of information to quantify block freshness. AoBI measures the time elapsed from the freshest transaction generation to the completion of block consensus. To make block propagation optimization tractable, we classify miners into five different states and propose a block propagation model for public blockchains inspired by epidemic models. Moreover, considering that the miners are bounded rational, we propose an incentive mechanism based on the evolutionary game for block propagation to improve block propagation efficiency. Numerical results demonstrate that compared with other block propagation mechanisms in public blockchains, the proposed scheme has a higher block forwarding probability, which improves block propagation efficiency and decreases the minimum value of average AoBI.