Abstract: In order to meet various challenges in the Internet of things (IoT), such as identity authentication, privacy preservation of distributed data and network security, the integration of blockchain and IoT became a new trend in recent years. As the key supporting technology of blockchain, the consensus algorithm is a hotspot of distributed system research. At present, the research direction of the consensus algorithm is mainly focused on improving throughput and reducing delay. However, when blockchain is applied to IoT scenario, the storage capacity of lightweight IoT devices is limited, and the normal operations of blockchain system cannot be guaranteed. To solve this problem, an improved version of Raft (Imp Raft) based on Raft and the storage compression consensus (SCC) algorithm is proposed, where initialization process and compression process are added into the flow of Raft. Moreover, the data validation process aims to ensure that blockchain data cannot be tampered with. It is obtained from experiments and analysis that the new proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the size of the blockchain and the storage burden of lightweight IoT devices.

Key words: consensus algorithm, Raft, Internet of things (IoT), blockchain