Hao Xu, Paulo Valente Klaine, Oluwakayode Onireti, Bin Cao · 6 authors
The sixth-generation (6G) network must provide better performance than previous generations to meet the requirements of emerging services and applications, such as multi-gigabit transmission rate, higher reliability, and sub-1 ms latency and ubiquitous connection for the Internet of Everything (IoE). However, with the scarcity of spectrum resources, efficient resource management and sharing are crucial to achieving all these ambitious requirements. One possible technology to achieve all this is the blockchain. Because of its inherent properties, the blockchain has recently gained an important position, which is of great significance to the 6G network and other networks. In particular, the integration of the blockchain in 6G will enable the network to monitor and manage resource utilization and sharing efficiently. Hence, in this paper, we discuss the potentials of the blockchain for resource management and sharing in 6G using multiple application scenarios, namely, Internet of things, device-to-device communications, network slicing, and inter-domain blockchain ecosystems.
The combined cooling, heating and power (CCHP) system is a typical distributed, electricity-gas integrated energy scheme in a community. First, it generates electricity by use of gas, and then exploits the waste heat to supply community with heat and cooling. In this paper, we consider a smart city consisting of a number of communities (CCHPs) and an agent of power grid (APG), where CCHPs can sell energy to the APG according to its bid. To study all utilities of entities in such a city from energy trading, a noncooperative Stackelberg game between APG and CCHPs is formulated. Here, the APG gives a bid for buying the energy from CCHPs, then CCHPs respond to the APG with their optimal energy supply that maximizing their utilities according to this bid. We show that the maximum profit to the APG and utilities to the CCHPs can be obtained at the Stackelberg equilibrium, which is guaranteed to exist and unique. Because the complete information about energy supply of each CCHP is unknown to the APG in advance, we propose a distributed algorithm that is able to find the point of equilibrium through a limited number of iterations. Taking privacy protection and transaction security into consideration, we design a blockchain-enabled energy management system. This system is composed of Internet of Energy (IoE) sub-system and blockchain sub-system, where the information interactions as well as energy transactions between APG and CCHPs can be carried out effectively and safely. Finally, security analysis and numerical simulations show the effectiveness and accuracy of our proposed mechanism.
Blockchain technology can play a vital role in the space industry and exploration. This magic technology can provide decentralized and secure techniques for processing and manipulating space resources as space digital tokens. Tokenizing space resources such as orbits, satellites, spacecraft, orbital debris, asteroids, and other space objects in the form of blockchain-based digital tokens will reflect plenty of various applications in the space mining industry. Moreover, Blockchain algorithms based on smart contracts can be utilized for tracking all space transactions and communications in a transparent, verifiable, and secure manner. This paper is one of the first attempts towards conceptually investigating adopting blockchain theory in the space industry based on space digital token concept. A new conceptual blockchain in space industry framework is proposed, and new models are created for introducing proposed solutions for some major challenges in the space industry and exploration. Finally, the paper is ended with discussing SpaceChain, the first open-source blockchain-based satellite network in the world as a case study of applying blockchain theory in designing and implementing satellite systems.
In this paper, we develop a new framework called blockchain-based Radio Frequency (RF)-powered backscatter cognitive radio network. In the framework, IoT devices as secondary transmitters transmit their sensing data to a secondary gateway by using the RF-powered backscatter cognitive radio technology. The data collected at the gateway is then sent to a blockchain network for further verification, storage and processing. As such, the framework enables the IoT system to simultaneously optimize the spectrum usage and maximize the energy efficiency. Moreover, the framework ensures that the data collected from the IoT devices is verified, stored and processed in a decentralized but in a trusted manner. To achieve the goal, we formulate a stochastic optimization problem for the gateway under the dynamics of the primary channel, the uncertainty of the IoT devices, and the unpredictability of the blockchain environment. In the problem, the gateway jointly decides (i) the time scheduling, i.e., the energy harvesting time, backscatter time, and transmission time, among the IoT devices, (ii) the blockchain network, and (iii) the transaction fee rate to maximize the network throughput while minimizing the cost. To solve the stochastic optimization problem, we then propose to employ, evaluate, and assess the Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) with Dueling Double Deep Q-Networks (D3QN) to derive the optimal policy for the gateway. The simulation results clearly show that the proposed solution outperforms the conventional baseline approaches such as the conventional Q-Learning algorithm and non-learning algorithms in terms of network throughput and convergence speed. Furthermore, the proposed solution guarantees that the data is stored in the blockchain network at a reasonable cost.
Smart Grid, an intelligent connected grid consisting of millions of smart devices, used to collect data from the grid to improve the efficiency of its operation. These smart devices communicating wirelessly are susceptible to attacks and hence the security and privacy of the smart devices along with the smart grid is a major challenge. Blockchain-based systems provide improved security and privacy and hence gained a lot of attention in the recent past. This paper proposes a blockchain-based architecture for Neighborhood Area Networks (NANs) and Home Area networks (HANs) in Smart Grid. The paper presents a security analysis in terms of confidentiality, integrity and availability to show that the proposed blockchain-based Smart Grid architecture is secure. Also, the impact of the improved security on packet delays, energy and computational overhead is discussed.
Dinh C Nguyen, Pubudu N Pathirana, Ming Ding, Aruna Seneviratne
Recently, blockchain has gained momentum in the academic community thanks to its decentralization, immutability, transparency and security. As an emerging paradigm, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) has been widely used to provide computation and storage resources to mobile user equipments (UE) at the edge of the network for improving the performance of mobile applications. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain-based MEC architecture where UEs can offload their computation tasks to the MEC servers. In particular, a blockchain network is deployed and hosted on the MEC platform as Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) that supports smart contract-based resource trading and transaction mining services for mobile task offloading. To enhance the performance of the blockchain-empowered MEC system, we propose a joint scheme of computation offloading and blockchain mining. Accordingly, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize edge service revenue and blockchain mining reward while minimizing the service computation latency with respect to constraints of user service demands and hash power resource. We then propose a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approach using a double deep Q-network (DQN) algorithm to solve the proposed problem. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the other baseline methods in terms of better system utility with computational efficiency. Experiment results also verify that the trading contract design is efficient with low operation cost, showing the feasibility of the proposed scheme.
Dinh C. Nguyen, Pubudu N. Pathirana, Ming Ding, Aruna Seneviratne
The fifth generation (5G) wireless networks are on the way to be deployed around the world. The 5G technologies target to support diverse vertical applications by connecting heterogeneous devices and machines with drastic improvements in terms of high quality of service, increased network capacity and enhanced system throughput. Despite all these advantages that 5G will bring about, there are still major challenges to be addressed, including decentralization, transparency, risks of data interoperability, network privacy and security vulnerabilities. Blockchain can offer innovative solutions to effectively solve the challenges in 5G networks. Driven by the dramatically increased capacities of the 5G networks and the recent breakthroughs in the blockchain technology, blockchain-based 5G services are expected to witness a rapid development and bring substantial benefits to future society. In this paper, we provide a state-of-art survey on the integration of blockchain with 5G networks and beyond. Our key focus is on the discussions on the potential of blockchain for enabling key 5G technologies, including cloud/edge computing, Software Defined Networks, Network Function Virtualization, Network Slicing, and D2D communications. We then explore the opportunities of blockchain to important 5G services, ranging from spectrum management, network virtualization, resource management to interference management, federated learning, privacy and security provision. The recent advances in the applications of blockchain in 5G Internet of Things are also surveyed in various domains, i.e. smart healthcare, smart city, smart transportation, smart grid and UAVs. The main findings derived from the survey are then summarized, and possible research challenges with open issues are also identified. Lastly, we complete this survey by shedding new light on future directions of research on this newly emerging area.
Nikhil Ravi, Shammya Shananda Saha, Anna Scaglione, Nathan G. Johnson
In recent years, many Blockchain based frameworks for transacting commodities on a congestible network have been proposed. In particular, as the number of controllable grid connected assets increases, there is a need for a decentralized, coupled economic and control mechanism to dynamically balance the entire electric grid. Blockchain based Transactive Energy (TE) systems have gained significant momentum as an approach to sustain the reliability and security of the power grid in order to support the flexibility of electricity demand. What is lacking in these designs, however, is a mechanism that physically verifies all the energy transactions, to keep the various inherently selfish players honest. In this paper, we introduce a secure peer-to-peer network mechanism for the physical validation of economic transactions cleared over a distributed ledger. The framework is $\textit{secure}$ in the sense that selfish and malicious agents that are trying to inject false data into the network are prevented from adversely affecting the optimal functionality of the verification process by detecting and isolating them from the communication network. Preliminary simulations focusing on TE show the workings of this framework.
Blockchain is a popular method to ensure security for trusted systems. The benefits include an auditable method to provide decentralized security without a trusted third party, but the drawback is the large computational resources needed to process and store the ever-expanding chain of security blocks. The promise of blockchain for edge devices (e.g., internet of things) poses a variety of challenges and strategies before adoption. In this paper, we explore blockchain methods and examples, with experimental data to determine the merits of the capabilities. As for an aerospace example, we address a notional example for Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) from Flight24 data (https://www.flightradar24.com/) to determine whether blockchain is feasible for avionics systems. The methods are incorporated into the Lightweight Internet of Things (IoT) based Smart Public Safety (LISPS) framework. By decoupling a complex system into independent sub-tasks, the LISPS system possesses high flexibility in the design process and online maintenance. The Blockchain-enabled decentralized avionics services provide a secured data sharing and access control mechanism. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.
Mostafa Zaman Chowdhury, Md. Shahjalal, Shakil Ahmed, Yeong Min Jang
Fifth-generation (5G) communication, which has many more features than fourth-generation communication, will be officially launched very soon. A new paradigm of wireless communication, the sixth-generation (6G) system, with the full support of artificial intelligence is expected to be deployed between 2027 and 2030. In beyond 5G, there are some fundamental issues, which need to be addressed are higher system capacity, higher data rate, lower latency, and improved quality of service (QoS) compared to 5G system. This paper presents the vision of future 6G wireless communication and its network architecture. We discuss the emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, terahertz communications, optical wireless technology, free space optic network, blockchain, three-dimensional networking, quantum communications, unmanned aerial vehicle, cell-free communications, integration of wireless information and energy transfer, integration of sensing and communication, integration of access-backhaul networks, dynamic network slicing, holographic beamforming, and big data analytics that can assist the 6G architecture development in guaranteeing the QoS. We present the expected applications with the requirements and the possible technologies for 6G communication. We also outline the possible challenges and research directions to reach this goal.
Dinh C. Nguyen, Pubudu N. Pathirana, Ming Ding, Aruna Seneviratne
\n\t\t\t\t\tBlockchain technology with its secure, transparent and decentralized nature has been recently employed in many mobile applications. However, the process of executing extensive tasks such as computation-intensive data applications and blockchain mining requires high computational and storage capability of mobile devices, which would hinder blockchain applications in mobile systems. To meet this challenge, we propose a mobile edge computing (MEC) based blockchain network where multi-mobile users (MUs) act as miners to offload their data processing tasks and mining tasks to a nearby MEC server via wireless channels. Specially, we formulate task offloading, user privacy preservation and mining profit as a joint optimization problem which is modelled as a Markov decision process, where our objective is to minimize the long-term system offloading utility and maximize the privacy levels for all blockchain users. We first propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based offloading scheme which enables MUs to make optimal offloading decisions based on blockchain transaction states, wireless channel qualities between MUs and MEC server and user’s power hash states. To further improve the offloading performances for larger-scale blockchain scenarios, we then develop a deep RL algorithm by using deep Q-network which can efficiently solve large state space without any prior knowledge of the system dynamics. Experiment and simulation results show that the proposed RL-based offloading schemes significantly enhance user privacy, and reduce the energy consumption as well as computation latency with minimum offloading costs in comparison with the benchmark offloading schemes.\n\t\t\t\t
Dinh C. Nguyen, Pubudu N. Pathirana, Ming Ding, Aruna Seneviratne
For current and future Internet of Things (IoT) networks, mobile edge-cloud computation offloading (MECCO) has been regarded as a promising means to support delay-sensitive IoT applications. However, offloading mobile tasks to the cloud gives rise to new security issues due to malicious mobile devices (MDs). How to implement offloading to alleviate computation burdens at MDs while guaranteeing high security in mobile edge cloud is a challenging problem. In this paper, we investigate simultaneously the security and computation offloading problems in a multi-user MECCO system with blockchain. First, to improve the offloading security, we propose a trustworthy access control mechanism using blockchain, which can protect cloud resources against illegal offloading behaviours. Then, to tackle the computation management of the authorized MDs, we formulate a computation offloading problem by jointly optimizing the offloading decisions, the allocation of computing resource and radio bandwidth, and smart contract usage. This optimization problem aims to minimize the long-term system costs of latency, energy consumption and smart contract fee among all MDs. To solve the proposed offloading problem, we develop an advanced deep reinforcement learning algorithm using a double-dueling Q-network. Evaluation results from real experiments and numerical simulations demonstrate the significant advantages of our scheme over the existing approaches.
Shivam Saxena, Hany E. Z. Farag, Aidan Brookson, Hjalmar Turesson · 5 authors
This paper proposes a peer to peer (P2P), blockchain based energy trading market platform for residential communities with the objective of reducing overall community peak demand and household electricity bills. Smart homes within the community place energy bids for its available distributed energy resources (DERs) for each discrete trading period during a day, and a double auction mechanism is used to clear the market and compute the market clearing price (MCP). The marketplace is implemented on a permissioned blockchain infrastructure, where bids are stored to the immutable ledger and smart contracts are used to implement the MCP calculation and award service contracts to all winning bids. Utilizing the blockchain obviates the need for a trusted, centralized auctioneer, and eliminates vulnerability to a single point of failure. Simulation results show that the platform enables a community peak demand reduction of 46%, as well as a weekly savings of 6%. The platform is also tested at a real-world Canadian microgrid using the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain framework, to show the end to end connectivity of smart home DERs to the platform.
Lyra2REv2 is a hashing algorithm that consists of a chain of individual hashing algorithms, and it is used as a proof-of-work function in several cryptocurrencies. The most crucial and exotic hashing algorithm in the Lyra2REv2 chain is a specific instance of the general Lyra2 algorithm. This work presents the first hardware implementation of the specific instance of Lyra2 that is used in Lyra2REv2. Several properties of the aforementioned algorithm are exploited in order to optimize the design. In addition, an FPGA-based hardware implementation of a standalone miner for Lyra2REv2 on a Xilinx Multi-Processor System on Chip is presented. The proposed Lyra2REv2 miner is shown to be significantly more energy efficient than both a GPU and a commercially available FPGA-based miner. Finally, we also explain how the simplified Lyra2 and Lyra2REv2 architectures can be modified with minimal effort to also support the recent Lyra2REv3 chained hashing algorithm.
The device-to-device (D2D) communication is one of the promising technologies of the future Internet of Things (IoT), but its security-related issues remain challenging. The block-chain is considered to be a secure and reliable distributed ledger, so we can treat the device user equipment (D-UE) request for the reusing resources of cellular user equipment (C-UE) as a transaction and put it into a transaction pool, then package the record into the block-chain. In this paper, we study the D2D communication resource allocation scheme based on sparse code multiple access (SCMA). Firstly, the system's interference model and block-chain-based transaction flow are analyzed. Then we propose the optimization problem so that C-UE can get the maximum revenue by sharing its resources to D-UE. This problem is NP-hard, so we propose a heuristic algorithm based on semi-definite relaxation (SDR) programming to solve it. Finally, the performance of the proposed algorithm is verified by simulation of different system parameters.
Chinese power grid enterprises are in need for development of digital asset management system. The characteristics of decentralization, self-trust and self-confidence, pave a promising technical path for power grid digital assess management and Big Data applications. This article firstly introduces the state-of-the-art of power grid Big Data and digital asset management, and the related issues in power grid enterprises. The solution of blockchain based digital asset management technology and its implementation are presented in details, followed by a discussion of their future developmental directions.
Networked flying platforms can be used to provide cellular coverage and capacity. Given that 5G and beyond networks are expected to be always available and highly reliable, resilience and reliability of these networks must be investigated. This paper introduces the specific features of airborne networks that influence their resilience. We then discuss how machine learning and blockchain technologies can enhance the resilience of networked flying platforms.
Michiel Van Beirendonck, Louis-Charles Trudeau, Pascal Giard, Alexios Balatsoukas‐Stimming
Lyra2REv2 is a hashing algorithm that consists of a chain of individual hashing algorithms and it is used as a proof-of-work function in several cryptocurrencies that aim to be ASIC-resistant. The most crucial hashing algorithm in the Lyra2REv2 chain is a specific instance of the general Lyra2 algorithm. In this work we present the first FPGA implementation of the aforementioned instance of Lyra2 and we explain how several properties of the algorithm can be exploited in order to optimize the design.
Van Hoa Nguyen, Yvon Bésanger, Quoc Tuan Tran, Minh Tri Le
As more and more distributed renewable energy resources are integrated to the grid, the traditional consumers have become the prosumers who can sell back their surplus energy to the others who are in energy shortage. This peer-to-peer (P2P) energy transaction framework benefits the end users, financially and in term of energy security; and the network operators, in term of flexibility in DRES management, peak load shifting and regulation of voltage/frequency. Environmentally, P2P energy transaction also helps to reduce carbon footprint, reduces DRES payback period and incentivizes the installation of DRES. The current centralized market model is no longer suitable and it is therefore necessary to develop an adapted decentralized architecture for the advanced P2P energy transaction framework intra/inter-micro grid. In this paper, we discuss several distributed ledger approaches for such framework: Blockchain, Block Lattice and Directed Acyclic Graph (the Tangle). The technical advantages of these architectures as well as the persistent challenges are then considered.