Scalable and Cost-Efficient PoA Consensus-Based Blockchain Solution for Vaccination Record Management

• Published in: Wireless personal communications 2024-03, Vol.135 (2), p.1177-1207
• Main Authors: Sharma, Neetu, Rohilla, Rajesh
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Access control; Availability; Blockchain; Communications Engineering; Computer Communication Networks; Contracts; Cost analysis; Cost control; Cryptography; Engineering; Immunization; Integrity; Networks; Signal,Image and Speech Processing
• ISSN: 0929-6212; 1572-834X
• DOI: 10.1007/s11277-024-11115-1

The integrity of vaccination records is essential for protecting the public from deadly diseases. Currently, vaccination records are scattered across various health organizations' custody in a centralized manner, making them vulnerable to invalid alteration or even complete loss. The benefits of blockchain include immutability, integrity, availability, and transparency, which ensure that trustworthy vaccination records are easily accessible. This research aims to create a scalable and cost-effective proof of authority (PoA) consensus-based blockchain solution for vaccination record management. It can be beneficial to ensure that accurate records are available for scheduled vaccinations, medication, migration, education, or employment. Scalability, limited functionality, high execution costs, resource consumption, and store-house costs are all issues with current blockchain-based vaccination systems. By verifying the hash of vaccination certificates on the Ethereum blockchain, the suggested system preserves the accuracy of vaccination records. Vaccination records are stored off-chain through the interplanetary le system (IPFS) based on patient preference for scalability, availability, and store-house cost savings. Furthermore, the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus engine used by the current blockchain-based systems is extremely energy-intensive. The PoA consensus process employed by the suggested system was economical. Through the remix IDE, smart contracts with extra features and access controls are successfully implemented. The performance of the contracts is assessed by examining the execution costs of various transaction sizes. We presented a security analysis for detecting vulnerabilities using the Mythril tool. Additionally, we assessed the data availability using patient preference and IPFS-network parameters for optimal results.