Enhancing the resilience of activity-adjusted stake consensus for blockchain-based IoT environments

The Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing rapid proliferation, driven by developments in decision-making strategies, where Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising distributed computing paradigm. Blockchain has diversified IoT environments, reducing dependence on fully centralized network infrastructure. The events within a Blockchain network are validated and verified by a majority of the network, and the agreement is maintained through consensus mechanisms. Needless to say, the fairness of the consensus mechanism is a pressing issue when the network infrastructure is not centrally controlled, and multiple IoT devices dynamically join and leave the network. We propose the Activity-Adjusted Stake Consensus (AASC), an iterative, lightweight, transformative protocol that is adaptive to parameters for Blockchain-integrated IoT frameworks. In AASC, the reputation of every validator is maintained, and a consensus score is calculated using the proposed mechanism, which depends on the accumulated past and present behavior of the nodes rather than static stake alone, naturally capturing reliability under node churn, termed activity. The mechanism incorporates a parallelized broadcast layer with constant-time duplicate suppression and structured peer handling, ensuring efficient message propagation even in a dense topology of intermittently connected nodes. Beyond the conventional rule-based consensus, AASC achieves efficient O(v) communication and O(vlog v) computation cost per-round while explicitly accounting for the dynamism and heterogeneity of resource-constrained IoT nodes (where v is the number of validators). The comparative studies and analytics demonstrate the fairness and broad usability of AASC by integrating masked validator selection and swift penalization into the activity-based trust system, thereby addressing the predictability of validators. As a result, AASC delivers substantially higher and more stable throughput as node count and churn increase, providing strong security guarantees, effectively mitigating Sybil, collusion, and stake monopolization attacks, and significantly improving the resilience of a dynamic Blockchain-based IoT environment. © 2026 Elsevier B.V.