- Azimuth offers an alternative to standard proof of work
- Small IoT devices will connect automatically
- The concept will enhance the machine to machine economy
The IOTA Foundation is introducing a spam protection concept that enables nodes to accept incoming transactions from neighboring nodes. This will enable small IoT devices to join the IOTA network and takes us closer to the realization of a machine-to-machine economy.
IOTA and the machine to machine economy
According to an official blog post on June 24, Azimuth, which was initially known as Network Bound Proof of Work (NB PoW), will provide nodes with active protection without using unnecessary computational power associated Proof-of-Work (PoW). Small IoT devices that use Azimuth will easily connect with nearby devices via auto peering and join the IOTA network without wasting their resources. The blog post explained:
“In Azimuth, nodes can send transactions to nearby neighbors through the air. On receipt, the neighbors make a note of which direction a transaction came from before processing it […] if, during the same round, a neighbor receives another transaction from the same direction, it will treat it as spam and ignore it.”
Spam reduction
As per the announcement, the IOTA Foundation has decided to develop Azimuth to protect innocent users from dishonest ones who send too many spam transactions to a node in an attempt to take it offline. IOTA uses the proof-of-work (PoW) to discourage spamming, this system is expensive in terms of time and energy used. While this may work well for servers and laptops that can access the internet, smaller devices on the IoT are constrained for power due to their size and too much of it gets wasted.
Currently, relatively high computational / energy costs for the Proof of Work (PoW) (used as a spam protection for the network) are necessary before attaching a message to the tangle. The algorithm is necessary for finding the best two tips to be confirmed before issuing the transactions. However, according to the announcement, “When a device uses Azimuth, it need not do any work. The action of sending a transaction from a given direction is enough. By using this approach, small IoT nodes can save energy, extend battery life, and avoid doing those troublesome push-ups.”
As the number and complexity of devices using the internet increases, they open a possibility of a future where machines will not only communicate with each other over the internet but also possibilities of trades. The upcoming machine economy has potential for a security system where systems will be able to autonomously buy cloud computation capacity or storage space and electric cars that could charge automatically. That’s where IOTA, a new cryptocurrency that focused on M2M transactions, comes in.