The revolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming many concepts, making them “Smart”. It has revolutionized many areas of real life. Smart City is one of the key concepts of this revolution. Although cities are being digitally transformed, it still has obstacles along the way. In this paper, we have analyzed different publications for our Systematic Literature Review (SLR). This study highlights the areas where the blockchain is used and determines the benefits of using blockchain. The main contribution is to explore and identify the barriers and hurdles in Smart City Domain and how these hurdles are mitigated by the blockchain technology. This Systematic Study also addresses different challenges and issues such as security, immutability, interoperability, decentralization, privacy, and trust in the development of Smart Cities. An overview of the systematic research is also presented that would help identify the most and least studied concerns addressed in this study. This paper aims at analyzing how blockchain technology is used in different smart city business models, what are the features of blockchain that could consider it to be used beyond crypto currencies. We hope that this study can inspire interest in theory and exercise to stand-in discussions in this area adhere to these limits.
J. A. García-García, N. Sánchez-Gómez, David Lizcano, María José Escalona · 5 authors
BlockChain Technology (BCT) has appeared with strength and promises an authentic revolution on business, management, and organizational strategies related to utilization of advanced software systems. In fact, BCT promotes a decentralized architecture to process management and the collaborative work between entities when these ones are working together in a business process. This paper aims to know what proposals exist to improve any stage of business process management using BCT because this technology could provide benefits in this management. For this purpose, this paper presents a systematic literature review in area of Collaborative Business Processes (CBP) in BCT domain to identify opportunities and gaps for further research. This paper concludes there is a rapid and growing interest of public bodies, scientific community and software industries to know opportunities that BCT offers to improve CBP management in a decentralized manner. However, although the topic is in early stages, there are very promising lines of research and relevant open issues, but there also is lack of scientific rigor in validation process into the different studies.
Affaf Shahid, Umair Sarfraz, Muhammad Waseem Malik, Muhammad Sohaib Iftikhar · 6 authors
Supply chains are evolving into automated and highly complex networks and are becoming an important source of potential benefits in the modern world. However, it is challenging to track the provenance of data and maintain traceability throughout the network. The traditional supply chains are centralized and dependent on third party for trading. Centralized systems lack transparency, accountability and auditability. In our proposed solution, we have presented a blockchain-based reputation system in Agriculture and Food (Agri-Food) supply chain. It leverages the key features of blockchain and smart contract deployed over ethereum blockchain network. Although blockchain provides an immutable network for supply chain events, it still fails to solve the problem of trust among entities. Therefore, a reputation system is required that logs reviews of sellers and maintains the trust between trading entities.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Building trust relationships between different decentralized entities in the IoT ecosystem is essential. Hereof, the combination of blockchain technology and trust evaluation techniques is recently considered as an efficient measure. However, both technologies within the IoT are still facing some limitations which are addressed in this research. First, this publication reviews various blockchain-based trust approaches and depicts their strengths and limitations regarding their usage in decentralized IoT communities. Then, an optimized trust model with a multi-layer adaptive and trust-based weighting system is proposed. Additionally, different trust metric parameters and their mathematical models used for trust evaluation are presented. Moreover, this publication presents a novel approach for incentivization processes in the IoT marketplace using control loops and smart contracts. Thereby, participants are motivated to continuously improve their behavior. Finally, the proposed trust model is proved to be reliable. The experimental results conducted from different scenarios show that the presented approach provides more resiliency against various attacks than existing ones.
Classified protection is one of primary security policies of information system in many countries. With the increasing popularity of blockchain in various fields of applications, it is extremely necessary to promote classified protection for blockchain's risk assessment in order to push forward the sustainable development of blockchain. Taking the Level 3 in Chinese classified protection 2.0 as an example, this paper proposes the common evaluation rules on blockchain to ensure that blockchain can meet the needs of countries to build it as critical infrastructure. Both assessment requirements and enforcement proposals are presented and analyzed from the standpoint of blockchain's core technologies, e.g., peer-to-peer network, distributed ledger, contract's scripting system, and consensus mechanism. Moreover, the assessment results on three main platforms, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Hyperledger, are summarized and analyzed in compliance with the control points specified in the level 3. Our investigation indicates that the current blockchain is able to satisfy the requirements of evaluation items in many aspects, such as software fault tolerance, resource control, backup and recovery, but further improvements are still needed for some aspects, including security audit, access control, identification and authentication, data integrity, etc., in order to satisfy the requirements of important fields on national security, economic development and human life.
Mohammad Wazid, Ashok Kumar Das, Sachin Shetty, Minho Jo
The Internet of Intelligent Things (IoIT) communication environment can be utilized in various types of applications (for example, intelligent battlefields, smart healthcare systems, the industrial internet, home automation, and many more). Communications that happen in such environments can have different types of security and privacy issues, which can be resolved through the utilization of blockchain. In this paper, we propose a tutorial that aims in desiging a generalized blockchain-based secure authentication key management scheme for the IoIT environment. Moreover, some issues with using blockchain for a communication environment are discussed as future research directions. The details of different types of blockchain are also provided. Some of the widely-accepted consensus algorithms are then discussed. Next, we discuss different types of applications in blockchain-based IoIT communication environments. The details of the associated system models are provided, such as, the network and attack models for the blockchain-based IoIT communication environment, which are helpful in designing a security protocol for such an environment. A practical demonstration of the proposed generalized scheme is provided in order to measure the impact of the scheme on the performance of the essential parameters. Finally, some of the future research challenges in the blockchain-based IoIT communication environment are highlighted, which will also be helpful to the researchers.
Rafael Genés-Durán, Diana Yarleque-Ruesta, Marta Bellés-Muñoz, Antonio Jimenez-Viguer · 5 authors
New manufacturing paradigms require a large number of business interactions between multiple cyber-physical systems with different owners. In this context, public distributed ledgers are disruptive because they make it possible to securely and publicly record proofs of agreements between parties that do not necessarily trust each other. Many industry leaders have already achieved significant business benefits using this technology, including greater transparency, improved traceability, enhanced security, increased transaction speed and costs reduction. While the benefits of blockchain technologies for industrial applications are unquestionable, these technologies have an inherent complexity that might be overwhelming for many users. To decrease entry barriers for industry users to distributed ledger technologies, it is necessary to have an easy user onboarding process and a simple key life-cycle management. In this paper, we propose an architecture that facilitates these processes and simplifies how users utilize decentralized applications without sacrificing on the expected security. To achieve this goal, our architecture uses a middleware that allows us to decouple the digital signatures required for paying blockchain fees from the ones required for authorization. This approach has the advantage that users are not forced to create wallets, buy cryptocurrency, or protect their private keys. For these reasons, our solution is a promising way of enabling a reasonable transition to the integration of distributed ledger technologies in industrial business processes.
The concept of Industry 4.0 is a newly emerging focus of research throughout the world. However, it has lots of challenges to control data, and it can be addressed with various technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Software Defined Networking (SDN), and Blockchain (BC) for managing data securely. Further, the complexity of sensors, appliances, sensor networks connecting to the internet and the model of Industry 4.0 has created the chal-lenge of designing systems, infrastructure and smart applications capable of continuously analyzing the data produced. Regarding these, the authors present a distributed Blockchain-based security to industry 4.0 applications with SDN-IoT enabled environment. Where the Blockchain can be capable of leading the robust, privacy and confidentiality to our desired system. In addition, the SDN-IoT incorporates the different services of industry 4.0 with more security as well as flexibility. Furthermore, the authors offer an excellent combination among the technologies like IoT, SDN and Blockchain to improve the security and privacy of Industry 4.0 services properly. Finally , the authors evaluate performance and security in a variety of ways in the presented architecture.
Jiawen Kang, Zehui Xiong, Chunxiao Jiang, Yi Liu · 9 authors
The emerging Federated Edge Learning (FEL) technique has drawn considerable attention, which not only ensures good machine learning performance but also solves "data island" problems caused by data privacy concerns. However, large-scale FEL still faces following crucial challenges: (i) there lacks a secure and communication-efficient model training scheme for FEL; (2) there is no scalable and flexible FEL framework for updating local models and global model sharing (trading) management. To bridge the gaps, we first propose a blockchain-empowered secure FEL system with a hierarchical blockchain framework consisting of a main chain and subchains. This framework can achieve scalable and flexible decentralized FEL by individually manage local model updates or model sharing records for performance isolation. A Proof-of-Verifying consensus scheme is then designed to remove low-quality model updates and manage qualified model updates in a decentralized and secure manner, thereby achieving secure FEL. To improve communication efficiency of the blockchain-empowered FEL, a gradient compression scheme is designed to generate sparse but important gradients to reduce communication overhead without compromising accuracy, and also further strengthen privacy preservation of training data. The security analysis and numerical results indicate that the proposed schemes can achieve secure, scalable, and communication-efficient decentralized FEL.
In the next-generation computing, the role of cloud, internet, and smart devices will be capacious. Nowadays we all are familiar with the word smart. This word is used a number of times in our daily life. The Internet of Things (IoT) will produce remarkable different kinds of information from different resources. It can store and process big data in the cloud. The fogging acts as an interface between cloud and IoT. The IoT nodes are also known as fog nodes, these nodes are able to access anywhere within the range of the network. The blockchain is a novel approach to record the transactions in a sequence securely. Developing new blockchains based integrated framework in the architecture of the IoT is one of the emerging approaches to solving the issue of communication security among the IoT public nodes. This research explores a novel approach to integrate blockchain technology with the fog and IoT networks and provides communication security to the internet of smart devices. The framework is tested and implemented in the IoT network. The results are found positive.
Sarah Iqbal, Asad Waqar Malik, Anis Ur Rahman, Rafidah Md Noor
With the widespread adoption of the internet of things (IoT) technologies towards building a smart city, connected devices often offload computation tasks to nearby edge locations (base stations) to reduce overall computation and network delay. However, serving an ever-increasing number of end devices at these traditional edge locations is becoming impossible, subsequently making them fail to deliver the agreed quality of service to all requesting devices. However, the backend cloud data center is available to serve these requests but incurred additional communication delay, thus, unsuitable for delay-sensitive applications. Furthermore, the fact that the underlying network is inherently ad hoc which makes it prone to malicious nodes affecting its overall performance. In this work, we propose a secure fog computing paradigm where roadside units (RSUs) are used to offload tasks to nearby fog vehicles based on repute scores maintained at a distributed blockchain ledger. The experimental results demonstrate a significant performance gain in terms of queuing time, end-to-end delay, and task completion rate when compared to the baseline queuing-based task offloading scheme.
Abstract A blockchain is a decentralized distributed public database. It does not have a central authority to maintain this public database by running a cryptographic protocol with distributed nodes. Bitcoin is currently the hottest item in the blockchain, and the Bitcoin node can verify the transaction content and package it into the block. The blockchain guarantees the consistency of the books through the underlying consensus agreement. These consensus algorithms are different because the algorithm security assumptions are different from the actual requirements. This paper sorts and compares various blockchain consensus algorithms, sorts out the development based on blockchain consensus, and points out the advantages and disadvantages of various algorithms, and proposes the development direction of blockchain consensus algorithm. CCS Concepts •Anonymity and privacy issues and measures to enhance them➝Consensus protocols for blockchains
Blockchain is an emerging field of study in a number of applications and domains. Especially when combine with Internet of Things (IoT) this become truly transformative, opening up new plans of action, improving engagement and revolutionizing many sectors including agriculture. IoT devices are intelligent and have high critical capabilities but low-powered and have less storage, and face many challenges when used in isolation. Maintaining the network and consuming IoT energy by means of redundant or fabricated data transfer lead to consumption of high energy and reduce the life of IoT network. Therefore, an appropriate routing scheme should be in place to ensure consistency and energy efficiency in an IoT network. This research proposes an efficient routing scheme by integrating IoT with Blockchain for distributed nodes which work in a distributed manner to use the communicating links efficiently. The proposed protocol uses smart contracts within heterogeneous IoT networks to find a route to Base Station (BS). Each node can ensure route from an IoT node to sink then base station and permits IoT devices to collaborate during transmission. The proposed routing protocol removes redundant data and blocks IoT architecture attacks and leads to lower consumption of energy and improve the life of network. The performance of this scheme is compared with our existing scheme IoT-based Agriculture and LEACH in Agriculture. Simulation results show that integrating IoT with Blockchain scheme is more efficient, uses low energy, improves throughput and enhances network lifetime.
C.K.M. Lee, Yunzhang Huo, Shuzhu Zhang, Kam K.H. Ng
Smart manufacturing is the core of the modern production and manufacturing industry as it moves towards digitalization. The successful implementation of smart manufacturing needs the support of information technology, data technology, and operational technology, among which edge computing, blockchain technology and artificial intelligence can play significant roles facilitating the development of smart manufacturing. In this research, a smart manufacturing system is proposed considering the integration of edge computing and blockchain technology. The introduction of edge computing can balance the computational workload and provide a more timely response for terminal devices. Blockchain technology can be utilized to promote both the device-level data transmission and the manufacturing service transaction. Moreover, regarding the computational task assignment in smart manufacturing systems, a mathematical model is proposed, and further solved using a swarm intelligence-based approach. Numerical experiments show that the introduction of the edge computing mechanism in smart manufacturing can significantly improve the processing time, especially with a large number of tasks.
With smart contracts, a wide range of applications can be implemented on blockchains. Ethereum stores smart contract byte code with the smart contract ad-dress so, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) can read and execute transactions correctly. All executed transactions (both successful and failed transactions) are stored on the platform permanently. Failed transactions are thrown by the EVM due to runtime errors and result in monetary waste. The waste from these transactions add up to around 2 million Ethers or $634.2 million. In this thesis, we propose Evitar, a warning algorithm for reducing Ethereum smart contract runtime errors, which has two mechanisms. First, Evitar proposes that users send transactions with the maximum gas allowed to avoid Out of Gas errors. However, this results in an extremely high transaction fee when transactions fail. Second, Evitar analyzes transactions called to each method in smart contracts and marks a method as a method with a high failure rate if the number of failed transactions reaches Evitar’s threshold. This mechanism prevents users from sending and paying for transactions that are likely to fail. We run experiments to evaluate the performance of Evitar by replaying transactions in a private network. The results show that Evitar can reduce failed transactions up to 99.52% compared to sending under default behaviour in exchange for a reduction in successful transactions by 1.78%. The amount of gas used by Evitar is only one-tenth compared to sending under default behaviour. Sending transactions with the maximum gas in Evitar reduces Out of Gas errors by 99.25%. In addition, Evitar can save up to 15.04 GB (82.32%) of storage in the Geth default node and 50.09 GB (50.09%) in the Parity full archive node.
Showkat Ahmad Bhat, Ishfaq Bashir Sofi, Chong‐Yung Chi
The internet is progressing towards a new technology archetype grounded on smart systems, heavily relying on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), blockchain platforms, edge computing, and the internet of things (IoT). The merging of IoT, edge computing, and blockchain will be the most important factor of empowering new automatic service and commercial models with various desirable properties, such as self-verifying, self-executing, immutability, data reliability, and confidentiality provided by the advancement in blockchain smart contracts and containers. Motivated by the potential paradigm shift and the security features brought by blockchain from the traditional centralized model to a more robust and resilient decentralized model, this tutorial article proposes a multi-tier integrated blockchain and edge computing architecture for 5G and beyond for solving some security issues faced by resource-constrained edge devices. We begin with a comprehensive overview of different edge computing paradigms and their research challenges. Next, we present the classification of security threats and current defense mechanisms. Then, we present an overview of blockchain and its potential solutions to the main security issues in edge computing. Furthermore, we present the classification of facilitating developers of different architectures to select an appropriate platform for particular applications and offer insights for potential research directions. Finally, we provide key convergence features of the blockchain and edge computing, followed by some conclusions.
Blockchain technology has been developed with the vision to enable trusted collaboration between untrusted parties, without the need for a central authority. Despite its many promising applications, the technology suffers from a scalability problem. In order to increase transaction throughput and decrease transaction confirmation latency, payment channel networks have been proposed. Payment channel networks introduce a layer on top of the main chain, in which transactions can happen in a safe manner between only the transacting parties without burdening the entire network. In this article, we present and highlight the many interesting research aspects this new type of network introduces. We first provide background on the mechanics of the operation of payment channel networks, and then proceed to present a plethora of research problems of networking and/or economics flavor arising in this context, including routing, scheduling, rebalancing, network design and topology analysis, and fee optimization. This work is within the scope of both the networking and network economics communities.
Distributed ledger technology is the driving force behind the blockchain technology and is proving its usefulness in various types of transaction processing systems. Fast, secure, reliable and efficient transactions are the key features of the blockchain based applications. A suitable or optimal size of block used by an application is dependent on the number of transactions in each block. Block size optimization is an important issue for any blockchain based application as it directly affects the performance of the application as scalability bottlenecks could prevent higher throughput and cause congestion. A larger block size will require higher transmission time compared to the smaller block size. A smaller block is more efficient but building too small a block will require higher block composition time to clear all the transactions. Both performance factors are contradictory to each other. An efficient blockchain network requires a suitable block size that demands lesser transmission time and block composition time. This paper proposes meta-heuristic algorithm based techniques for finding the suitable block size. It uses meta-heuristic algorithms to find the optimal number of transaction in each block. These algorithms are multi-objective particle swarm optimization and strength Pareto evolutionary algorithm. Experimental results reveal that the suitable block size is 213 transactions per block. Since size of a transaction is taken as 1.2 Kb, hence the results show that an optimal block size is of 255 Kbytes when network bandwidth of miners varies from 250 kbps to 1200 kbps. This shall achieve lower block transmission time and block composition time.
Skills gap between company needs and competencies occupied by the workforce can be the source of inefficiencies. The purpose of this research is to develop a blockchain-based human resource (HR) framework to match the needs from the company and workforce competencies This framework will help Corporate Training Centre to standardized the competencies which then used by HR Department to develop the training material. In order to get valid information regarding skills that are needed from the company, we develop a prototype based on Blockchain. Hence, blockchain-based HRM is built to improve the quality of workforce competency in an organization. The current organizations are struggling to fulfil the needs of the workforce in accordance with industry quality standards. Therefore, this will help all parties to create a consensus between the needs of the industry with the labour market. Corporate Training Centre through the competent institution will be the mediator or intermediary to unite the information from companies, training institutions, and Professional Certification Institutions. As a result, in the long term, the needs of the workforce with the qualification required by the company in such industries will always fit the current situation. Blockchain helps to process the information and data needed by each party so that the connection between parties will be assisted efficiently and effectively.
Consensus mechanisms are at the core of any Distributed Ledger Technology. They define how transactions are validated and verified, how the network resolves conflicts and protects against malicious intent, and how multiple devices on a distributed network with no central authority arrive at the same global view of the ledger. Experience with the consensus mechanisms employed in popular blockchain platforms have warranted years of research into more scalable and energy-efficient consensus mechanisms for a green society using constrained devices. Most of the “high-security” consensus mechanisms require the use of computational resources which are simply not available to devices with a constrained nature. Hence, the presence and activity of these devices do not contribute to the security of the ledger, irrespective of how numerous they are on the network. In this paper, we propose a novel consensus scheme, fully dependent on WiFi technology, suitable for constrained devices. Whilst in traditional Blockchain consensus mechanisms, constrained devices do not add to the security of the ledger, the security of our consensus mechanism increases with the number of connected devices.
Mohammad Tahir, Mohamed Hadi Habaebi, Mohammad Dabbagh, Amna Mughees · 6 authors
Until now, every evolution of communication standard was driven by the need for providing high-speed connectivity to the end-user. However, 5G marks a radical shift from this focus as 5G and beyond networks are being designed to be future-proof by catering to diverse requirements of several use cases. These requirements include Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications, Massive Machine-Type Communications and Enhanced Mobile Broadband. To realize such features in 5G and beyond, there is a need to rethink how current cellular networks are deployed because designing new radio access technologies and utilizing the new spectrum are not enough. Several technologies, such as software-defined networking, network function virtualization, machine learning and cloud computing, are being integrated into the 5G networks to fulfil the need for diverse requirements. These technologies, however, give rise to several challenges associated with decentralization, transparency, interoperability, privacy and security. To address these issues, Blockchain has emerged as a potential solution due to its capabilities such as transparency, data encryption, auditability, immutability and distributed architecture. In this paper, we review the state-of-art application of Blockchain in 5G network and explore how it can facilitate enabling technologies of 5G and beyond to enable various services at the front-haul, edge and the core. Based on the review, we present a taxonomy of Blockchain application in 5G networks and discuss several issues that can be solved using Blockchain integration. We then present various field-trials and Proof of concept that are using Blockchain to address the challenges faced in the current 5G deployment. Finally, we discuss various challenges that need to be addressed to realize the full potential of Blockchain in beyond 5G networks. The survey presents a broad range of ideas related to Blockchain integration in 5G and beyond networks that address issues such as interoperability, security, mobility, resource allocation, resource sharing and management, energy efficiency and other desirable features.
A blockchain is a digitized, decentralized, public ledger of all cryptocurrency transactions. The blockchain is transforming industries by enabling innovative business practices. Its revolutionary power has permeated areas such as bank-ing, financing, trading, manufacturing, supply chain management, healthcare, and government. Blockchain and the Internet of Things (BIOT) apply the us-age of blockchain in the inter-IOT communication system, therefore, security and privacy factors are achievable. The integration of blockchain technology and IoT creates modern decentralized systems. The BIOT models can be ap-plied by various industries including e-commerce to promote decentralization, scalability, and security. This research calls for innovative and advanced re-search on Blockchain and recommendation systems. We aim at building a se-cure and trust-based system using the advantages of blockchain-supported secure multiparty computation by adding smart contracts with the main blockchain protocol. Combining the recommendation systems and blockchain technology allows online activities to be more secure and private. A system is constructed for enterprises to collaboratively create a secure database and host a steadily updated model using smart contract systems. Learning case studies include a model to recommend movies to users. The accuracy of models is evaluated by an incentive mechanism that offers a fully trust-based recom-mendation system with acceptable performance.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques