Hybrid Satellite-Ground Deployments for Web3 DID: System Design and Performance Analysis

The emerging Web3 has great potential to provide worldwide decentralized services powered by global-range data-driven networks in the future. To ensure the security of Web3 services among diverse user entities, a decentralized identity (DID) system is essential. Especially, a user's access request to Web3 services can be treated as a DID transaction within the blockchain, executed through a consensus mechanism. However, a critical implementation issue arises in the current Web3, i.e., how to deploy network nodes to serve users on a global scale. To address this issue, emerging Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communication systems, such as Starlink, offer a promising solution. With their global coverage and high reliability, these communication satellites can complement terrestrial networks as Web3 deployment infrastructures. In this case, this paper develops three hybrid satellite-ground modes to deploy the blockchain-enabled DID system for Web3 users. Three modes integrate ground nodes and satellites to provide flexible and continuous DID services for worldwide users. Meanwhile, to evaluate the effectiveness of the present hybrid deployment modes, we analyze the complete DID consensus performance of blockchain on three hybrid satellite-ground modes. Moreover, we conduct numerical and simulation experiments to verify the effectiveness of three hybrid satellite-ground modes. The impacts of various system parameters are thoroughly analyzed, providing valuable insights for implementing the worldwide Web3 DID system in real-world network environments.