In this paper, an encryption and trust evaluation model is proposed on the basis of a blockchain in which the identities of the Aggregator Nodes (ANs) and Sensor Nodes (SNs) are stored. The authentication of ANs and SNs is performed in public and private blockchains, respectively. However, inauthentic nodes utilize the network's resources and perform malicious activities. Moreover, the SNs have limited energy, transmission range and computational capabilities, and are attacked by malicious nodes. Afterwards, the malicious nodes transmit wrong information of the route and increase the number of retransmissions due to which the SNs' energy is rapidly consumed. The lifespan of the wireless sensor network is reduced due to the rapid energy dissipation of the SNs. Furthermore, the throughput increases and packet loss increase with the presence of malicious nodes in the network. The trust values of SNs are computed to eradicate the malicious nodes from the network. Secure routing in the network is performed considering residual energy and trust values of the SNs. Moreover, the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA), a cryptosystem that provides asymmetric keys, is used for securing data transmission. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed model in terms of high packet delivery ratio.
Traditional centralized access control faces data security and privacy problems. The core server is the main target to attack. Single point of failure risk and load bottleneck are difficult to solve effectively. And the third-party data center cannot protect data owners. Traditional distributed access control faces the problem of how to effectively solve the scalability and diversified requirements of IoT (Internet of Things) applications. SCAC (Smart Contract-based Access Control) is based on ABAC (Attributes Based Access Control) and RBAC (Role Based Access Control). It can be applied to various types of nodes in different application scenarios that attributes are used as basic decision elements and authorized by role. The research objective is to combine the efficiency of service orchestration in edge computing with the security of consensus mechanism in blockchain, making full use of smart contract programmability to explore fine grained access control mode on the basis of traditional access control paradigm. By designing SSH-based interface for edge computing and blockchain access, SCAC parameters can be found and set to adjust ACLs (Access Control List) and their policies. The blockchain-edge computing combination is powerful in causing significant transformations across several industries, paving the way for new business models and novel decentralized applications. The rationality on typical process behavior of management services and data access control be verified through CPN (Color Petri Net) tools 4.0, and then data statistics on fine grained access control, decentralized scalability, and lightweight deployment can be obtained by instance running in this study. The results show that authorization takes into account both security and efficiency with the “blockchain-edge computing” combination.
Blockchain has been an interesting area of exploration for some time and the advantages it provides have been exploited by a variety of different businesses. Basically, the medical service area has benefited greatly from blockchain innovations due to safety, security, confidentiality and decentralization. Overall, the Electronic Wellbeing Record (EHR) system addresses issues related to information security, honesty and fairness. In this paper, we talk about how blockchain innovation can be used to change the EHR framework and can be the answer to this problem. We present a system that can be used for the implementation of blockchain innovations in the field of medical services for EHR. The essence of our proposed system is first and foremost to implement blockchain innovations for EHR and in addition to provide secure electronic records capacity by characterizing granular access rules for clients of the proposed structure. Moreover, this structure also speaks to the flexibility issue that blockchain innovation sees as a whole through the use of the off-chain capacity of the record. This structure gives the EHR framework the advantage of having a blockchain-based setup that is versatile, secure, and basic. The information on the blockchain is apparent to everybody that is available on the chain this makes the information weak which is anything but an ideal result for a decentralized stage.
Clement Nartey, Eric Tutu Tchao, James Dzisi Gadze, Bright Yeboah‐Akowuah · 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.
Building upon the prevailing concept of edge computing (EC), a distributed EC market requires decentralized and verified transaction management to trade computing resources. Towards this goal, we study a blockchain-aided EC market wherein each data service operator (DSO) rents a group of edge computing nodes (ECNs) and leases the ECNs to the user terminals (UTs) to provide computation offloading services. A trustworthiness model is introduced to evaluate the quality of each network entity throughout the transactions. We develop a two-level trading mechanism over smart contract to enable the automatic and efficient transactions among the network entities and provide high quality services. First, we propose a smart contract based matching mechanism to establish the renting association between the DSOs and ECNs with the aim of maximizing the social welfare. Second, we propose a social welfare improved double auction (SWIDA) mechanism to build up the leasing association between the DSOs and UTs, and determine the pricing of the winners. We show that the proposed double auction mechanism can achieve individual rationality, balanced budget, truthfulness in expectation, and an improved social welfare than the benchmark mechanisms. Moreover, we put forth a trustworthiness driven Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism to enable verified transaction and fair allocation of block generation reward. Following the principle of PoS, we formulate the block generation as a coalitional game, wherein each stakeholder votes according to its trustworthiness and coinage, and shares the reward among the coalition according to the Shapley values. The simulation results show that the proposed PoS consensus mechanism can reduce the wealth inequality among the network entities compared with the conventional consensus mechanisms.
Internet of Things (IoT) has been ubiquitous in both industrial and living areas, but also known for its weak security. Being as the first defense line against various cyberattacks, authentication is even more critical to IoT applications. Moreover, there has been a growing demand for cross-domain collaboration, leading to an increasing need for cross-domain authentication. Recently, certificate-based authentication schemes have been extensively studied. However, many of these schemes are not efficient in computation, storage, and communication, which are highly required in IoT. In this paper, we propose a lightweight authentication scheme based on consortium blockchain and design a cryptocurrency-like digital token to build trust. Furthermore, trust lifecycle management is performed by manipulating the amount of tokens. The comprehensive analysis and evaluation demonstrate that the proposed scheme is resistant to various common attacks and more efficient than competitor schemes in terms of storage, communication, and authentication cost.
A S M Touhidul Hasan, Shabnam Sabah, Rakib Ul Haque, Apubra Daria · 6 authors
Supply chain management (SCM) is essential for a company’s faster, efficient, and effective product life cycle. However, the current SCM systems are insufficient to provide product legitimacy, transaction privacy, and security. Therefore, this research proposes a secure SCM system for the authenticity of the products based on the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technology. The IoT-enabled Quick Response (QR) scanner and the blockchain-integrated distributed system will allow all the SCM stakeholders to begin secure and private transactions for their products or services. Resulting, the consumer will receive an authentic and genuine product from the original producer. A lightweight asymmetric key encryption technique, i.e., elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and Hyperledger Fabric-based blockchain technology with on-chain smart contracts are applied for distributed IoT devices to make the authentication process faster and lighter. Each SCM stakeholder is registered by the service provider and receives corresponding public and private keys, which will be used for the authentication process of the participants and IoT devices. The authenticated QR scanner records all transactions on the blockchain. Consequently, there will be no human intervention for the SCM transactions. The security and scalability analysis demonstrates that the proposed system is more secure and robust than other state-of-the-art techniques.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain ecosystems are rapidly maturing and meeting the needs of business environments (e.g., industry, manufacturing, and robotics). The decentralized approaches in industries enable novel business concepts, such as machine autonomy and servitization of manufacturing environments. Introducing the distributed ledger technology principles into the machine sharing and servitization economy faces several challenges, and the integration opens new interesting research questions. Our research focuses on data and event models and secure upgradeable smart contract platforms for machine servitization. Our research indicates that with the proposed approaches, we can efficiently separate on- and off-chain data and assure scalability of the DApp without compromising the trust. We demonstrate that the secure upgradeable smart contract platform, which was adapted for machine servitization, supports the business workflow and, at the same time, assures common identification and authorization of all the participants in the system, including people, devices, and legal entities. We present a hybrid decentralized application (DApp) for the servitization of 3D printing. The solution can be used for or easily adapted to other manufacturing domains. It comprises a modular, upgradeable smart contract platform and off-chain machine, customer and web management, and monitoring interfaces. We pay special attention to the data and event models during the design, which are fundamental for the hybrid data storage and DApp architecture and the responsiveness of off-chain interfaces. The smart contract platform uses a proxy contract to control the access of smart contracts and role-based access control in function calls for blockchain users. We deploy and evaluate the DApp in a consortium blockchain network for performance and privacy. All the actors in the solution, including the machines, are identified by their blockchain accounts and are compeers. Our solution thus facilitates integration with the traditional information-communication systems in terms of the hybrid architectures and security standards for smart contract design comparable to those in traditional software engineering.
Florin Gîrbacia, Gheorghe-Daniel Voinea, Răzvan Gabriel Boboc, Mihai Duguleană · 5 authors
Abstract Blockchain proves to be a powerful technology that can drive forward the automotive industry. This paper describes how blockchain has been applied, which automotive areas are most interested in the technology, as well as the benefits and challenges of blockchain for the automotive industry by a systematic literature review. Blockchain offers many advantages, such as: transparency, security, high speed of operations. There are numerous areas where this technology could be applied in the automotive domain: better protection against counterfeit spare parts and materials, effective preventive maintenance, by informing the services based on the data received from the car sensors, monitoring of the cars by the rental companies, the safe storage of the data used by intelligent navigation systems, in order not to affect the safety of the passengers, autonomous transactions, triggered by the vehicle for making payments in charging stations, all with the purpose of facilitating a good and safer medium for drivers. The future vehicle will be connected both with other vehicles, but also with the existing infrastructure, so a database containing cryptographically secure information is needed, and blockchain is such a solution that can be applied in the dynamic nature of traffic.
Muhammad Umar Javed, Abid Jamal, Eman H. Alkhammash, Myriam Hadjouni · 6 authors
In the underlying work, the problems faced during message dissemination in the conventional Vehicular Energy Networks (VENs) like lack of security, breach of personal identities, absence of trust between vehicle owners, etc., are tackled. In this study, a Blockchain (BC) based announcement system is proposed for VENs to ensure secure and reliable announcement dissemination in the proposed network. The proposed system is a three-layered system comprising message dissemination layer, storage layer and BC layer. In the first layer, all the vehicles are registered through a Certificate Authority (CA), which ensures only the legitimate vehicles become part of the proposed network and interact with each other. Later, in the second layer, the data sent by the vehicles is stored at the artificial intelligence based Interplanetary File System (IPFS), which is incorporated with the Road Side Units (RSUs). This ensures reduction in storage cost and data availability. Besides, vehicle owners’ privacy is ensured by concealing the real identities of the vehicles. Moreover, the hashes of the data stored in the IPFS are stored in BC in the third layer. Also, lightweight trustworthiness verification of the vehicles, reputation based incentivization and concealing predictable trends in vehicles’ reputation scores are performed in the same layer. Overall, the novelty of the proposed work lies in the fact that the proposed system efficiently tackles different problems encountered in the existing systems simultaneously. Through extensive simulations, it is inferred that the computational time is reduced by 15-18% and the storage overhead is reduced by 80-85%, respectively when storing hash of data on the BC network as compared to storing actual data on the network.
R. Bhaskaran, R. Karuppathal, M. Karthick, J. Vijayalakshmi · 6 authors
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0/5.0 offer several interconnections between machinery, equipment, processes, and personnel in diverse application areas namely logistics, supply chain, manufacturing, transportation, and healthcare. The conventional security-based solutions in IIoT environment get degraded due to the third parties. Therefore, the recent blockchain technology (BCT) can be employed to resolve trust issues and eliminate the need for third parties. Therefore, this paper presents a novel blockchain enabled secure optimal lightweight cryptography based image encryption (BC-LWCIE) technique for industry 4.0 environment. In addition, the BC-LWCIE technique involves the design of an optimal LWC based hash function with optimal key generation using chicken swarm optimization (CSO) algorithm. Moreover, the CSO algorithm derives a fitness function with the maximization of peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). The BC-LWCIE technique stores the cryptographic pixel values of the encrypted image in the BCT to ensure secrecy in the IIoT environment. In order to highlight the enhanced security performance of the BC-LWCIE technique, a series of simulations were carried out and the results demonstrated the betterment of the BC-LWCIE technique over the recent techniques.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Accountability and integrity are likely to play a key role in emerging health sensor network environments. Since health sensor devices are low capability devices, they are particularly susceptible to modern cyber threats. Blockchain technology is an emerging security technology that was explored by researchers in the past few years. Blockchain technology has been designed to protect information integrity and accountability. In a distributed manner making forgery and destruction of data can be very difficult. In this survey paper, we are specifically focused on how blockchain platforms adopt to the healthcare industry and achieve data integrity and accountability. Also, we will discuss the benefits and challenges of blockchain technology, and future blockchain research directions. Blockchain technology can be used to prevent unauthorized information access and enhance the security of sensor data. The use of blockchain technology in health sensor networks may address many of the integrity and accountability concerns of health sensor networks.
The Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technology and protocols are the main cornerstones for advanced transportation and autonomous vehicle applications. V2X has several subsets, including Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication contexts. The main benefit of applying V2X technologies is increased safety by facilitating predicted warnings supporting automated driving and traffic applications. Wirelessly transmitted messages are the information sources; therefore, security is critical in V2X systems. The V2X exchanged messages are sent wirelessly and must fulfill the security requirements, such as integrity, authenticity, and privacy support. The messaging between vehicles and networks must be trusted. Lately, promising and proliferating blockchain/hash chain technologies have been introduced in V2X communications and cope with the cooperative vehicular applications security and related efficiency aspects. This paper provides a comprehensive survey about the V2X use-cases based blockchain/hash chain and introduces the available solutions and methods in this domain.
The decoupling of the data plane and the control plane in the Software- Defined Network (SDN) can increase the flexibility of network management and operation. And it can reduce the network limitations caused by the hardware. However, the centralized scheme in SDN also can introduce some other security issues such as the single point of failure, the data consistency in multiple-controller environment and the spoofing attack initiated by a malicious device in the data plane. To solve these problems, a security framework for SDN based on Blockchain (BCSDN) is proposed in this paper. BCSDN adopts a physically distributed and logically centralized multi-controller architecture. LLDP protocol is periodically used to obtain the link state information of the network, and a Merkle tree is establised according to the collected link information and the signature is generate based on KSI for each link that submitted by a switch by the main controller selected by using the PoW mechanism. Such, the dynamic change of network topology is recorded on Blockchian and the consistency of the topology information among multiple controllers can be guaranteed. The main controller issues the signature to the corresponding switch and a controller checks the legitimate of a switch by verifying the signature when it requests the flow rule table from the controller later. The signature verification ensures the authenticated communication between a controller and a switch. Finally, the simulation of the new scheme is implemented in Mininet platform that is a network emulation platform and experiments are done to verify our novel solution in our simulation tool. And we also informally analysis the security attributes that provided by our BCSDN.
Jingya Dong, Chunhe Song, Tao Zhang, Yuanjian Li · 5 authors
Intelligent computing provides efficient, real‐time, and secure data analysis services for the Internet of Things (IoT). As the number of IoT devices increases, IoT generates massive, diverse, and multisourcing datasets that can be used to improve IoT services further. Models trained by intelligent computing from a single system or sensor are often not global, and sending all data directly to the computing platform wastes network bandwidth and may cause network congestion and even privacy leakage. To ensure IoT applications’ quality of service and privacy, we propose a framework that integrates edge computing and blockchain to provide lightweight data fusion and secure data analysis for IoT. We propose a lightweight data fusion method that can reduce the amount of data at the node level and prevent network congestion and bandwidth waste. Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical fuzzy hashing method to check and locate anomalies of IoT machine learning models to ensure the validity of IoT intelligent computing and the security of sensitive data. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the method proposed in this paper through experiments.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain brings some significant changes in many industries implementing a shared, decentralized public ledger. Characteristics like immutability, autonomy, and transparency make this technology desirable to all sectors. Industry 4.0 becomes more effective in building upon a concrete and robust system like blockchain since its integration provides trust, transparency, and sustainability. It can deal with several aspects of the industry like supply chain, tracking products, payments, database management, security, etc. Unlike other systems, there are some issues with company-level implementation and maintenance of blockchain. The solution to these issues can pave the way for blockchain to make industrial management more successful. In this chapter, we present a brief discussion on blockchain and its architecture. Specifically, we describe the classification and consensus mechanisms that are very important in the blockchain network. We also detail the transaction system in the blockchain. Later on, we discuss the fundamentals of Industry 4.0. Furthermore, we provide an explicit discussion on the usage of blockchain in the industry. Finally, we point out some issues that can create possible future research areas in blockchain for industries.
Victor Pasknel de Alencar Ribeiro, Raimir Holanda Filho, Alex Ramos, Joel J. P. C. Rodrigues
Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) is a new type of wireless technology that offers long range communication for devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) and LoRaWAN is one of the main technologies currently available to enable LPWAN environments. In the LoRaWAN architecture, the Join Server is a key component and is responsible for security tasks, such as authentication and key management. However, the Join Server acts as a Single Point of Failure (SPOF) since all encryption keys are stored centrally. Then, this paper presents a secure and fault-tolerant architecture to increase the levels of security and availability in LoRaWAN. A permissioned blockchain and smart contracts are used to replace the Join Server and solve the SPOF problem. A working prototype was created using open-source tools in order to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed architecture. Additionally, the performance of a blockchain network was analyzed in a cloud environment under multiple workloads and fault-tolerance experiments were performed to evaluate the impact of network failures. The results show a trade-off between availability and performance when choosing the number of blockchain peers in small scenarios. However, this behavior is reversed in large scenarios where the performance of multiple peers is best suited.
The emergence of the Internet of things (IoT), associated with the explosion in the number of connected objects, and the growth in user needs, makes the Internet network very complex. IoT objects are diverse and heterogeneous, which requires establishing interoperability and efficient identity management on the one hand. On the other hand, centralized architectures such as cloud-based ones can have overhead and high latency, with a potential risk of failure. Facing these challenges, Blockchain technology, with its decentralized architecture based on a distributed peer-to-peer network, offers a new infrastructure that allows IoT objects to interact reliably and securely. In this paper, a new approach is proposed with a three-layer architecture: layer of sensing and collection of data made up of the IoT network, layer of processing and saving of data exchanges at the Blockchain level, and access and visualization layer via a web interface. The prototype implemented in this study allows all transactions (data exchanges) generated by IoT devices to be recorded and stored on a dedicated Blockchain, assuring the security of IoT objects' communications. This prototype also enables access to and visualization of all data and information, thus enhancing the IoT network's transparency.
The current healthcare systems are facing many issues in terms of data management, data sharing, information security and patient privacy, data immutability, trust, and transparency. In addition, the multiple existing healthcare systems are centralized which complicates the healthcare professionals, patients in managing their data and causes several problems. Blockchain technology as a decentralized peer-to-peer network has the power to digitalize and transform the manner that the data are managed in the healthcare industry, in this regard, is one such domain that might benefit from Blockchain technology in different manners. This paper aims to improve a review of recent works on Blockchain-based healthcare applications.
Shahid Abbas, Hina Nasir, Ahmad Almogren, Ayman Altameem · 5 authors
Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) Networks are used to sense different aquatic parameters like temperature, pressure, pollution, etc. They are also used to forecast the ocean’s weather to collect information about natural disasters. However, they are easily compromised by attackers due to deployment in unattended environments. To overcome these issues, security is required in IoUT networks to avoid unauthorized access and ensure network credibility. This work proposes an authentication and a malicious node detection mechanism to restrict the unauthorized external nodes from accessing the network and the internal nodes from acting maliciously, respectively. Moreover, blockchain stores the hashes of sensor nodes’ credentials during the registration process to make the system secure and traceable. Meanwhile, a weighted trust evaluation mechanism is implemented for data aggregation and detection of malicious nodes. Moreover, an additive increase multiplicative decrease algorithm puts malicious nodes in an intensive observation queue to verify the data of malicious nodes before aggregating. Moreover, weights are assigned to sensor nodes based on their behaviour. If the weight of a sensor node becomes zero, it is revoked by the blockchain. The simulation results show the efficiency of our proposed malicious node detection mechanism in terms of energy consumption and propagation delay.
With the growing need of technology into varied fields, dependency is getting directly proportional to ease of user‐friendly smart systems. The advent of artificial intelligence in these smart systems has made our lives easier. Several Internet of Things‐ (IoT‐) based smart refrigerator systems are emerging which support self‐monitoring of contents, but the systems lack to achieve the optimized run time and data security. Therefore, in this research, a novel design is implemented with the hardware level of integration of equipment with a more sophisticated software design. It was attempted to design a new smart refrigerator system, which has the capability of automatic self‐checking and self‐purchasing, by integrating smart mobile device applications and IoT technology with minimal human intervention carried through Blynk application on a mobile phone. The proposed system automatically makes periodic checks and then waits for the owner’s decision to either allow the system to repurchase these products via Ethernet or reject the purchase option. The paper also discussed the machine level integration with artificial intelligence by considering several features and implemented state‐of‐the‐art machine learning classifiers to give automatic decisions. The blockchain technology is cohesively combined to store and propagate data for the sake of data security and privacy concerns. In combination with IoT devices, machine learning, and blockchain technology, the proposed model of the paper can provide a more comprehensive and valuable feedback‐driven system. The experiments have been performed and evaluated using several information retrieval metrics using visualization tools. Therefore, our proposed intelligent system will save effort, time, and money which helps us to have an easier, faster, and healthier lifestyle.
A dashboard camera (Dashcam) is attached to the front or rear of a vehicle to record images and video. As it is effective in crime prevention and accident management and it can also be used as learning data for Traffic Accident Detection technology for Autonomous Vehicles the use of Dashcam is increasing. However, the video data is stored on a memory card or a cloud server, so there is a high possibility of data loss and forgery. Although it is possible to prevent forgery and falsification using distributed storage based on blockchain technology, the authenticity and privacy of the image data stored in the blockchain cannot be guaranteed. In this study, to solve this problem, we propose a multi-signature-based access control method by grouping and storing video data of multiple vehicles based on GPS (Global Positioning System) data. To ensure the privacy of the video data stored in the blockchain, only users uploading video belonging to the relevant GPS can access nearby Dashcam videos. Through these experimental results, it show that Experimental results proposed method can maintain low latency in large-scale request environment to the privacy and reach data management efficiently in a distributed file system. According to our experiments, the dashcam video data distributed storage latency was fast enough, with an average of 25 ms for uploads and less than 15 ms for downloads. The signature generation time is 10ms, and the verification time required for access control is also less than 100 ms, which is the same even if the number of nodes increases, so scalability is not affected. The blockchain transaction processing took about 2 seconds, but it does not affect the V2V network. Also, client registration time does not affect performance.
Gaetano Volpe, Agostino Marcello Mangini, Maria Pia Fanti
The Blockchain has been given great attention in recent literature among emerging technologies in software architectures. More specifically, when verifiable transactions between untrusted parties are concerned in a safe and reliable environment, its peculiar decentralized and tamper-proof structure makes it suitable for a vast class of business domains, such as Cloud Manufacturing, which is a new paradigm in the industry based on cloud technologies. However, the stiffness of existing solutions, that are unable to provide and implement heterogeneous services in a Cloud environment, emphasizes the need of a standard framework to overcome this limit and improve collaboration. Firstly, this paper introduces a Blockchain based platform designed with Smart Contracts for improving digital processes in a manufacturing environment. The primary contribution is the integration of two popular cloud technologies within the Blockchain: Docker, a scalable platform to run applications in lightweight environments, and Cloud Storage. Each process available in the platform requires input files and produces output files by using cloud storage as a repository and it is delivered by the owner as a self-contained Docker image, whose digest is safely stored in the chain. Secondly, with the purpose of selecting the fastest node for each new process instance required by consumers, we introduce a task assignment problem based on a deep learning approach and past metrics. The proposed platform is applied to a real-world industrial case study regarding ophthalmic lenses manufacturing and the optimization of lens surface calculation.
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 miner’s computation-intensive mining burdens, as well as enabling mobile devices’ 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.