Fault-Tolerant QCA-Based Parity Pre-Filtering Circuits for Lightweight Edge-IoT Transaction Screening

Abstract

Edge Internet of Things (IoT) blockchain deployments increasingly rely on continuous transaction ingestion from resource-constrained IoT devices to nearby edge gateways over heterogeneous wireless links. In this setting, transient channel noise and packet corruption can inject invalid payloads into the edge processing pipeline and trigger unnecessary buffering, parsing, and, most critically, computationally expensive cryptographic operations such as digital signature verification. This leads to wasted computation, increased latency, and reduced energy efficiency at the edge, particularly under dense IoT traffic. This paper presents an energy-aware and fault-tolerant Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata (QCA)-based integrity pre-filter for IoT-to-edge blockchain transaction ingestion. At the circuit level, we adapt and modify a previously reported fault-tolerant five-input majority gate (MV5) structure and use it as a robust primitive for nanoscale integrity-screening circuits. Building on this modified MV5, we design a set of QCA integrity blocks, including a parity checker, a compact XNOR gate circuit, a parity-bit generation circuit, and a sender-to-channel/receiver nano-communication integrity workflow suitable for early screening of corrupted payloads. Compared with the best previously reported baseline considered in this study, the modified MV5 achieves 76.47% tolerance to single-cell omission defects, corresponding to a 17.47 percentage-point increase and an approximately 29.61% relative improvement over the prior 59% omission-tolerance result, while preserving 100% tolerance against extra-cell deposition defects. At the system level, the proposed circuit is discussed as a potential early screening stage for edge-IoT blockchain transaction ingestion. A bounded analytical model is used to estimate the possible reduction in unnecessary signature-verification workload under assumed corruption and detection conditions. This analysis is not intended as a deployment-level validation; full edge-node implementation, throughput measurement, queueing-delay evaluation, real traffic traces, retransmission behavior, and empirical signature-verification profiling remain future work. The proposed parity/chunk-parity pre-filter is designed for low-cost detection of random transmission-induced corruption and does not replace cryptographic authentication, hashing, digital signatures, CRC-based detection, or blockchain validation. All proposed designs are validated using QCADesigner tools.