Ifteher Alom, Md Sadek Ferdous, Mohammad Jabed Morshed Chowdhury
Blockchain Technology is an emerging technology with the potential to disrupt a number of application domains. Though blockchain platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum have seen immense success and acceptability, their nature of being public and anonymous make them unsuitable for many enterprise level use-cases. To address this issue, Linux Foundation has started an open source umbrella initiative, known as the Hyperledger Platforms. Under this initiative, a number of private blockchain platforms have been developed which can be used for different enterprise level applications. However, the scalability and performance of these private blockchains must be examined to understand their suitability for different use-cases. Recent researches and projects on performance benchmarking for private blockchain systems are very specific to use-cases and are generally tied to a blockchain platform. In this article, we presentBlockMeter, an application agnostic performance benchmarking framework for private blockchain platforms. This framework can be utilised to measure the key performance matrices of any application deployed on top of an external private blockchain application in real-time. In this article, we present the architecture of the framework and discuss its different implementation aspects. Then, to showcase the applicability of the framework, we use BlockMeter to evaluate the two most widely used Hyperledger platforms, Hyperledger Fabric and HyperledgerSawtooth, against a number of use-cases.
The Internet of Things (IoT) incorporates billions of IoT devices (e.g., sensors, cameras, wearables, smart phones, as well as other internet-connected machines in homes, vehicles, and industrial plants), and the number of such connected IoT devices is currently growing rapidly. This paper proposes a novel Autonomic Global IoT Device Discovery and Integration Service (which we refer to as aGIDDI) that permits IoT applications to find IoT devices that are owned and managed by other parties in IoT (which we refer to as IoT device providers), integrate them, and pay for using their data observations. aGIDDI incorporates a suite of interacting sub-services supporting IoT device description, query, integration, payment (via a pay-as-you-go payment model), and access control that utilise a special-purpose blockchain to manage all information needed for IoT applications to find, pay and use the IoT devices they need. The paper describes aGIDDI's novel protocol that allows any IoT application to discover and automatically integrate and pay for IoT devices and their data that are provided by other parties. The paper also presents aGIDDI's architecture and proof-of-concept implementation, as well as an experimental evaluation of the performance and scalability of aGIDDI in variety of IoT device integration and payment scenarios.
Ahmed Alkhateeb, Cagatay Catal, Gorkem Kar, Alok Mishra
In recent years, research into blockchain technology and the Internet of Things (IoT) has grown rapidly due to an increase in media coverage. Many different blockchain applications and platforms have been developed for different purposes, such as food safety monitoring, cryptocurrency exchange, and secure medical data sharing. However, blockchain platforms cannot store all the generated data. Therefore, they are supported with data warehouses, which in turn is called a hybrid blockchain platform. While several systems have been developed based on this idea, a current state-of-the-art systematic overview on the use of hybrid blockchain platforms is lacking. Therefore, a systematic literature review (SLR) study has been carried out by us to investigate the motivations for adopting them, the domains at which they were used, the adopted technologies that made this integration effective, and, finally, the challenges and possible solutions. This study shows that security, transparency, and efficiency are the top three motivations for adopting these platforms. The energy, agriculture, health, construction, manufacturing, and supply chain domains are the top domains. The most adopted technologies are cloud computing, fog computing, telecommunications, and edge computing. While there are several benefits of using hybrid blockchains, there are also several challenges reported in this study.
Abstract The continuous decentralisation of the energy system due to the expansion of renewable energies requires new coordination mechanisms such as Local Energy Markets (LEMs) that are capable of integrating millions of prosumers as active participants. Since the end of the 2010s, the blockchain technology has been discussed as a potential infrastructure for LEMs and as a potential gameâchanger in the energy industry. In this work, the authors introduce LEM specific technologyâindependent infrastructure requirements, present a Solidity and Python toolbox that allows to compute a comparative performance analysis between a blockchainâbased and a central LEM and evaluate the added value of a blockchainâbased implementation compared to a conventional reference implementation. Simulations of a LEM with a periodic double auction and settlement showed that a blockchainâbased LEM operation requires more than 140 times the computation time compared to a centralised implementation and cannot fulfil data security requirements. Thus, the authors find that blockchain technology in its current state of development does not add significant value to LEMs. All implemented programmes are published in the openâsource project lemlab as part of the research project RegHEE .
Most of today's online services (e.g., social networks, search engines, market places) are centralized, which is recognized as unsatisfactory by a majority of users for various reasons (e.g., centralized governance, censorship, loss of control over personal data). Blockchain technologies promise a new Web revolution (Web 3.0) through the decentralization of online services. However, one of the key limitations for this revolution to happen at a planetary scale is the poor performance of today's blockchains. We propose in this paper ALDER, a solution for unlocking the performance of off-the-shelf leader-based blockchains by multiplexing their consensus protocol. Our solution leverages the existence of multiple potential leaders to alleviate the bottleneck that exists at different levels of consensus protocols. To illustrate the benefits it brings to Blockchain performance, we apply ALDER to three representative blockchains, namely Algorand (Proof-of-Stake), RapidChain (Sharding-based) and Bitcoin (Proof-of-Work). Our evaluation, involving up to 10,000 nodes deployed on 100 physical machines, shows that using ALDER can provide up to a 300% improvement in both throughput and latency reduction.
Deploying multi-domain network services is becoming a need for operators. However, achieving that in a real operational environment is not easy and requires the use of federation. Federation is a multi-domain concept that enables the use and orchestration of network services/resources to/from external administrative domains. In this article, we first characterize the federation concept and involved procedures, and then dive into the challenges that emerge when federation is performed in dynamic environments. To tackle these challenges, we propose the application of blockchain technology, identifying some associated high-level benefits. Last, we validate our proposed approach by conducting a small experimental scenario using Tendermint, an application-based blockchain.
Sharding is a solution to the blockchain scalability problem. A sharded blockchain divides consensus nodes (validators) into groups called shards and processes transactions separately to improve throughput and latency. In this paper, we analyze the rational behavior of users in account/balance model-based sharded blockchains and identify a phenomenon in which accounts (users' wallets and smart contracts) eventually get concentrated in a few shards, making shard loads unfair. This phenomenon leads to bad user experiences, such as delays in transaction inclusions and increased transaction fees. To solve this problem, we propose two load balancing methods in account/balance model-based sharded blockchains. Both methods perform load balancing by periodically reassigning accounts: in the first method, the blockchain protocol itself performs load balancing and in the second method, wallets perform load balancing. We discuss the pros and cons of the two protocols, and apply the protocols to the execution sharding in Ethereum 2.0, an existing sharding design. Further, we analyze by simulation how the protocols behave to confirm that we can observe smaller transaction delays and fees. As a result, we released the simulation program as âShargri-La,â a simulator designed for general-purpose user behavior analysis on the execution sharding in Ethereum 2.0.
In Bitcoin and Ethereum, nodes require a large storage capacity to maintain all of the blockchain data such as transactions. As of September 2021, the storage size of the Bitcoin blockchain has expanded to 355 GB, and it has increased by approximately 50 GB every year over the last five years. This storage requirement is a major hurdle to becoming a block proposer or validator. We propose an architecture called Trail that allows nodes to hold all blocks in a small storage and to generate and validate blocks and transactions. A node in Trail holds all blocks without transactions, UTXOs or account balances. The block size is approximately 8 kB, which is 100 times smaller than that of Bitcoin. On the other hand, a client who issues transactions needs to hold proof of its assets. Thus, compared to traditional blockchains, clients must store additional data. We show that proper data archiving can keep the account device storage size small. Then, we propose a method of executing smart contracts in Trail using a threshold signature. Trail allows more users to be block proposers and validators and improves the decentralization and security of the blockchain.
Blockchain technology can solve the problem of trust in the open network in a decentralized way. It has broad application prospects and has attracted extensive attention from academia and industry. The blockchain consensus algorithm ensures that the nodes in the chain reach consensus in the complex network environment, and the node status ultimately remains the same. The consensus algorithm is one of the core technologies of blockchain and plays a pivotal role in the research of blockchain technology. This article gives the basic concepts of the blockchain, summarizes the key technologies of the blockchain, especially focuses on the research of the blockchain consensus algorithm, expounds the general principles of the consensus process, and classifies the mainstream consensus algorithms. Then, focusing on the improvement of consensus algorithm performance, it reviews the research progress of consensus algorithms in detail, analyzes and compares the characteristics, suitable scenarios, and possible shortcomings of different consensus algorithms, and based on this, studies the future development trend of consensus algorithms for reference.
Blockchain is the distributed decentralized application for developing many of the use cases. In blockchain, the applications are transparent to all the nodes in the decentralized network and the application may be private or public depends upon the use cases. The nodes in the distributed network shares all the data to the other nodes without any modification in the blockchain technology. The transaction by the node is secured through the digital signatures. In this paper, we implemented the application by confirming the transaction without paying the gas fee by deploying the smart contract. The solidity is a JavaScript programming language for writing our smart contract. We explained the gas optimization technique used by the users and the gas station network in a decentralized application and also explained about the parameters in the Ethereum transactions. We used the open zeppelin library, which allows us to run our đ·đđđ to implement the gasless transaction.
Light nodes in blockchain systems are known to be vulnerable to data availability (DA) attacks where they accept an invalid block with unavailable portions. Previous works have used LDPC and 2-D Reed Solomon (2D-RS) codes with Merkle Trees to mitigate DA attacks. While these codes have demonstrated improved performance across a variety of metrics such as DA detection probability, they are difficult to apply to blockchains with large blocks due to generally intractable code guarantees for large codelengths (LDPC), large decoding complexity (2D-RS), or large coding fraud proof sizes (2D-RS). We address these issues by proposing the novel Polar Coded Merkle Tree (PCMT) which is a Merkle Tree built from the encoding graphs of polar codes and a specialized polar code construction called Sampling-Efficient Freezing (SEF). We demonstrate that the PCMT with SEF polar codes performs well in detecting DA attacks for large block sizes.
Quang Tung Thai, Namseok Ko, Sung Hyuk Byun, Sun-Me Kim
Blockchain technology allows public parties to agree on a common state without relying on a central authority. Despite it brings many innovative use cases, the technology is still in its early stage that needs improving on many aspects. One of the issues is to deliver blockchain data more efficiently. Named Data Networking (NDN), a new network paradigm, is designed to make content distribution with ease by enabling in-network caching and built-in multicasting, which blockchain technologies can take advantage. Moreover, blockchain may contribute to extending NDN application ecosystems including decentralized applications. Therefore, it is instrumental to have a working blockchain system that runs on NDN platform to supports its research and development. In this work, we design and implement an NDN-based Ethereum blockchain platform. We propose new protocols for propagating blockchain data making full use of NDN features for the delivery of transactions and blocks. Our experiments show that the distribution of blockchain data in NDN is more efficient than that of IP network. The latency of block delivery is also reduced, which in turn supports tuning blockchain parameter for better security. Our developed blockchain client is freely distributed as an open-source project. We hope that it can provide a platform to foster blockchain research on NDN in the future.
Clement Nartey, Eric Tutu Tchao, James Dzisi Gadze, Bright YeboahâAkowuah · 7 authors
Abstract The integration of Internet of Things devices onto the Blockchain implies an increase in the transactions that occur on the Blockchain, thus increasing the storage requirements. A solution approach is to leverage cloud resources for storing blocks within the chain. The paper, therefore, proposes two solutions to this problem. The first being an improved hybrid architecture design which uses containerization to create a side chain on a fog node for the devices connected to it and an Advanced Time-variant Multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm (AT-MOPSO) for determining the optimal number of blocks that should be transferred to the cloud for storage. This algorithm uses time-variant weights for the velocity of the particle swarm optimization and the non-dominated sorting and mutation schemes from NSGA-III. The proposed algorithm was compared with results from the original MOPSO algorithm, the Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm (SPEA-II), and the Pareto Envelope-based Selection Algorithm with region-based selection (PESA-II), and NSGA-III. The proposed AT-MOPSO showed better results than the aforementioned MOPSO algorithms in cloud storage cost and query probability optimization. Importantly, AT-MOPSO achieved 52% energy efficiency compared to NSGA-III. To show how this algorithm can be applied to a real-world Blockchain system, the BISS industrial Blockchain architecture was adapted and modified to show how the AT-MOPSO can be used with existing Blockchain systems and the benefits it provides.
Abstract Ability to perform fast analysis on massive public blockchain transaction data is needed in various applications such as tracing fraudulent financial transactions. The blockchain data is continuously growing and is organized as a sequence of blocks containing transactions. This organization, however, cannot be used for parallel graph algorithms which need efficient distributed graph data structures. Using message passing libraries (MPI), we develop a scalable cluster-based system that constructs a distributed transaction graph in parallel and implement various transaction analysis algorithms. We report performance results from our system operating on roughly 5 years of 10.2 million block Ethereum Mainnet blockchain data. We report timings obtained from tests involving distributed transaction graph construction, partitioning, page ranking of addresses, degree distribution, token transaction counting, connected components finding and our new parallel blacklisted address trace forest computation algorithm on a 16 node economical cluster set up on the Amazon cloud. Our system is able to construct a distributed graph of 766 million transactions in 218 s and compute the forest of blacklisted address traces in 32 s.
This paper provides an overview of blockchain technologyâs security and privacy features, as well as an overview of IoT-based cache memory and single-bit six transistor static random-access memory cell sense amplifier architecture. Each chipâs memory is used for recorded as blocks, which are encrypted and used as a blockchain for other memory devices. The architectures comprise of the circuit of write driver, six transistor static random access memory cells, and sense amplifiers such as current differential sense amplifier, charge transfer differential sense amplifier, and voltage latch sense amplifier. Furthermore, different parameters such as the number of transistors, sensing delay, and power consumption have been analyzed for varying resistance values (i.e., R=$42.3\Omega $and R=42.3K$\Omega$). Apart from that, power reduction techniques such as dual sleep, forced stack, sleep transistor, and sleep stack are used to optimize power consumption. These power reduction techniques are applied over different blocks of architecture, such as six transistors static random access memory cell and sense amplifier to optimize power consumption of the architecture. The conclusion arises that a single-bit six transistor static random access memory cell with power reduction dual sleep technique voltage latch sense amplifier with power reduction dual sleep technique in architecture consumes$11.65~\mu \text{W}$of power and has 33 transistors which are lowest from other architectures.
Blockchain has become one of the most demanding technologies of the decade. Blockchain is a decentralised digital record of information stored in a form of blocks in a chain of blocks called blockchain. It is totally dependent on the addition of new block in its chain. At a single time, there are a number of blocks ready to be added in the blockchain; choosing one valid block from this number of blocks is a complex and most important part of blockchain architecture. As we know that blockchain is a non-centralised system, it has peer-to-peer network in which blocks are added one by one to the chain of blocks only when a consensus is reached amongst the participants of the network. This paper presents a theory summarising of some consensus algorithm used in public, private and consortium blockchain technology along with pros and cons of each algorithms.
In order to reduce the cost of grid dispatching and increase the transparency of energy transactions, the distributed energy transaction model based on blockchain is constructed. At the same time, in order to improve the high communication overhead and low throughput of the traditional PBFT algorithm in the consortium blockchain, an efficient Byzantine faultâtolerant consensus mechanism (DEâBFT) for the energy blockchain is designed. The algorithm improves from two aspect: node election and main chain consensus. In the stage of node election, the model uses a health score evaluation and a verifiable random function to improve the security and randomness of node selection. In the stage of main chain consensus, the efficient data consistency interaction protocol decreases the complexity of the communications between nodes, down to a constant term level from exponential one. The result shows that, compared with other consensus algorithm, the DEâBFT algorithm performs better in terms of consensus delay, communication overhead, throughput, and consensus node reliability.
Blockchain technology is a promising resource management architecture due to its ability of building trust in a decentralized transaction. Block mining participants, i.e. miners, are incentivized with reward for successfully mining blocks. Unfortunately, solving the proof-of-work puzzle consumes substantial computing powers during the mining period, which greatly challenges miners. Mobile devices also fail to participate in mining because of limited resource. To solve these issues, we are motivated to propose a mining framework of alleviating minerâs computation-intensive mining burdens, as well as enabling mobile devicesâ participation. Depending on the proposed model, miners are capable of offloading their computation-intensive tasks to the edge cloud and mobile devices. The interactions among them formulate a muti-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game. We achieve the Subgame Perfect Equilibrium (SPE) in the game, which guarantees three types of participants to realize profit maximization. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.
The blockchain nexus with energy transactions in the distributed energy-trading arena successfully achieved a decentralized transaction and increased security. With the elimination of a third-party middle man, an electronic app is introduced to achieve decentralization and aid transactive communications. Observing the internet-of-things (IoT) intense protocols in the transactive communications amongst blockchain participants, however, leads to transaction time delay with associated uncertainty. This paper integrates the practical byzantine fault tolerance (pBFT) algorithm with the private Hyperledger Sawtooth blockchain network (P) to achieve a P-pBFT algorithm. The P-pBFT achieved a combined two-step transaction latency optimization (minimization) amongst the blockchain participants in the distributed energy generation (DEG) ecosystem. Through their combined feature extraction, further minimization is achieved by simulating the resulting transaction model derived from the integration. Subsequently, an optimization method is proposed to achieve the shortest transaction time given transaction constraints based on participantsâ comfort. Thus, the ratio of node population to the transaction size and the choice of constraints can be regulated at the participantsâ convenience to achieve minimum transaction time. Hence, the benefit of deciding the transaction time is achieved thereby eliminating the undesired characteristic uncertainty.
Md. Tayeen Khan, Md. Nozib Ud Dowla, Fardin Ahmed Niloy
The popularity of renewable energy is increasing due to its cost effectiveness. However, not everyone can generate and fulfill their energy demand, so energy trading is necessary. Current solutions are centralised and charged at a high fee for energy trading as they have a monopoly in the market. Energy trading requires the storage, verification, and sharing of data related to the trade while keeping records tamper-proof. Traditional database solutions are centralised and susceptible to data tempering. In our proposed scheme, we aim to solve those problems with the help of blockchain technology by storing data on blockchain and verifying transactions with the PoA consensus algorithm for faster processing. We tested our scheme against the Ethereum network and found that our scheme has a significant improvement in cost and processing. In the future, with the help of machine learning, pricing for each transaction can be optimised.
The research on the governing blockchain by blockchain supervision system is an important development trend of blockchain technology. In this system there is a supervisory blockchain managing and governing the supervised blockchain based on blockchain technology, results in a uniquely cross-blockchain demand to consensus mechanism for solving the trust problem between supervisory blockchain and supervised blockchain. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a cross-blockchain consensus mechanism based on smart contract and a set of smart contracts endorse the cross-blockchain consensus. New consensus mechanism called Proof-of-Endorse-Contracts (PoEC) consensus, which firstly transfers the consensus reached in supervisory blockchain to supervised blockchain by supervisory nodes, then packages the supervisory block in supervisory blockchain and transmits it to the smart contract deployed in the supervised blockchain, finally miners in supervised blockchain will execute and package the new block according to the status of the smart contract. The core part of the consensus mechanism is Endorse Contracts which designed and implemented by us and verified the effectiveness through experiments. PoEC consensus mechanism and Endorse Contracts support the supervised blockchain to join the governing blockchain by blockchain system without changing the original consensus mechanism, which has the advantages of low cost, high scalability and being able to cross-blockchain. This paper proves that our method can provide a feasible cross-blockchain governance scheme for the field of blockchain governance.
In this paper, we have proposed the intimate environment of multiblockchain optimization algorithm using big data inquiry to mend the effectiveness of association query handling among numerous multihoming blockchains by implementing the big data system. This technique adds semantic evidences to the oldâstyled multiblockchain prototype and constructs a semantic model of multiblockchain that delivers a foundation for linking queries among the various blockchain multihoming system in big data. On the base of this model, distributed databases have index arrangement, and a linking index arrangement is proposed among the numerous blockchains, with several attributes linked to these blockchains employed to improve the efficacy of linking calculation. Besides, the communication cost is d for data communication. On this foundation, a multichain linking enquiry algorithm based on optimization is anticipated to progress the productivity of multiblockchain connection queries. To conclude, two genuine big data community sets of data are used to conduct experiments on. The associating index arrangement among blockchains is unchanging and is equated with the oldâstyled direct linking inquiry operation. The multiblockchain linking query method of optimization shortens the probe processing procedure. It acquires the query outcomes directly by retrieving the linking index, sinking the local calculating ability, system overhead, and illuminating query efficacy.