The increasing demand for mobile data services has led to a need for efficient and cost-effective network sharing solutions. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution for addressing the challenges associated with network sharing, such as interoperability, trust, and accountability. This paper presents a comprehensive classification and categorization of blockchain-based network sharing scenarios, highlighting their advantages and limitations. We have identified seven network sharing scenarios, ranging from centralized network sharing to fully decentralized spectrum sharing. For each scenario, the suitability of some of the selected blockchain architectures, from public, private, sidechain, and hybrid, is evaluated through extensive evaluations. We also identify gaps and opportunities of blockchain-based network sharing solution and present future research directions at the end of paper. Our analysis and results reveal that a single blockchain architecture is not suitable for all network sharing scenarios but careful analysis should be performed when selecting the suitable blockchain network in network sharing.
Online social networks (OSNs) are becoming more and more integrated into people's everyday lives. In any case, since all notable OSNs are controlled, there are a few issues with privacy, management, and security. Users are usually restricted to using the services that OSN firms deploy after agreeing the OSN agreements. But a lot of contracts let OSN companies get to user data to provide personalized services like ads. Users typically have to submit a number of elaborate applications or even stop using such Online Social Network (OSN) if they don't let the businesses use their information while protecting their privacy. Blockchain technology combined with a decentralized architecture can address the aforementioned problems. In this architecture, most of the network functions are distributed among the multiple nodes. It means they are responsible for managing their own network policies, security and performance because the network traffic directly flows between those nodes. It is suggested in this project work to create an OSN service based on blockchain technology and demonstrate its decentralized operation. An enormous amount of data with generally low security requirements can be decentralized by storing it in the Interplanetary File system (IPFS). This distributes data to nodes consisting of hundreds of thousands of individual computers connected to the IPFS, rather than storing data in a single centralized server. A decentralized autonomous organization that allows users to democratically self-manage the OSN may be established in order to promote user autonomy.
This paper presents the design and preliminary development a new model based on blockchain for improving brand loyalty in agribusiness by customer reward. Using facilities of Ethereum Network and solidity programing, we have created an Agri non-fungible token (NFT) according to ERC-721 protocol that is most widely used protocol for creating NFTs on Ethereum. One of the main advantages of ERC-721 is its flexibility, as it allows developers to define custom metadata for each NFT and customize the attributes. The interaction between Ethereum nodes and the user is established via the frontend, which is developed in Nodejs and connects to the Ethereum network. In previous works on loyalty systems, blockchain-based solutions were proposed that resemble the system developed in this study but there are significant differences between our work and other related works such as: the use of NFT and personalization for customers, the adoption of a new version of Solidity, as well as the adoption of the metadata feature for using media to encourage and assist customer brand awareness and repurchase. We tried to provide a safe and transparent way to use NFTs in the way of increasing brand loyalty in agricultural businesses. Due to characters of NFTs as uniqueness and personalization, customers in a loyalty cycle prefer to shop more in order to earn more AgriNFT, causing retailer to sell more items and manufacturers to generate more goods.
Mikel Cortes-Goicoechea, Tarun Mohandas-Daryanani, José L. Muñoz, Leonardo Bautista-Gomez
Scalability is a common issue among the most used permissionless blockchains, and several approaches have been proposed to solve this issue. Tackling scalability while preserving the security and decentralization of the network is a significant challenge. To deliver effective scaling solutions, Ethereum achieved a major protocol improvement, including a change in the consensus mechanism towards Proof of Stake. This improvement aimed a vast reduction of the hardware requirements to run a node, leading to significant sustainability benefits with a lower network energy consumption. This work analyzes the resource usage behavior of different clients running as Ethereum consensus nodes, comparing their performance under different configurations and analyzing their differences. Our results show higher requirements than claimed initially and how different clients react to network perturbations. Furthermore, we discuss the differences between the consensus clients, including their strong points and limitations.
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Intracranial Aneurysms: Treatment and Complications
Trust is a critical element when it comes to news articles, and an important problem is how to ensure trust in the published information on news websites. First, this paper describes the inner workings of a proposed news-retrieval and aggregation architecture employed by a blockchain-based solution for fighting disinformation; this includes a comparison between existing information retrieval solutions. The decentralized nature of the solution is achieved by separating the crawling (i.e., extracting the web page links) from the scraping (i.e., extracting the article information) and having third-party actors extract the data. A majority-rule mechanism is used to determine the correctness of the information, and the blockchain network is used for traceability. Second, the steps needed to deploy the distributed components in a cloud environment seamlessly are discussed in detail, with a special focus on the open-source OpenStack cloud solution. Lastly, novel methods for achieving a truly decentralized architecture based on community input and blockchain technology are presented, thus ensuring maximum trust and transparency in the system. The results obtained by testing the proposed news-retrieval system are presented, and the optimizations that can be made are discussed based on the crawling and scraping test results.
Engin Zeydan, Luis Blanco, Josep Mangues, Şuayb S. Arslan · 5 authors
Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) has recently emerged as an identity and access management framework based on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) that enables users or organizations to control their own data. The Open RAN (O-RAN), on the other hand, provides a framework for sharing infrastructure-related data between users and mobile network operators (MNOs). By leveraging SSI, O-RAN can benefit from decentralized and secure identity management that enables a more transparent, efficient, and user-centric network ecosystem. This paper examines identity, inventory and configuration management, and authentication of users or MNOs for a resource sharing scenario in an O-RAN architecture. At the end of the paper, we explain the potential limitations and possible solutions for applying SSI to improve security, privacy, trust, and interoperability in O-RANs.
This research paper investigates the integration of blockchain technology to enhance the security of Android mobile app data storage. Blockchain holds the potential to significantly improve data security and reliability, yet faces notable challenges such as scalability, performance, cost, and complexity. In this study, we begin by providing a thorough review of prior research and identifying critical research gaps in the field. Android's dominant position in the mobile market justifies our focus on this platform. Additionally, we delve into the historical evolution of blockchain and its relevance to modern mobile app security in a dedicated section. Our examination of encryption techniques and the effectiveness of blockchain in securing mobile app data storage yields important insights. We discuss the advantages of blockchain over traditional encryption methods and their practical implications. The central contribution of this paper is the Blockchain-based Secure Android Data Storage (BSADS) framework, now consisting of six comprehensive layers. We address challenges related to data storage costs, scalability, performance, and mobile-specific constraints, proposing technical optimization strategies to overcome these obstacles effectively. To maintain transparency and provide a holistic perspective, we acknowledge the limitations of our study. Furthermore, we outline future directions, stressing the importance of leveraging lightweight nodes, tackling scalability issues, integrating emerging technologies, and enhancing user experiences while adhering to regulatory requirements.
Blockchain technology is a technology that inherently solves trust issues. It has the character-istics of decentralization, distributed storage, tamper resistance, security, and transparency. It ensures reliable communication between nodes that do not trust each other through consensus mechanisms, smart contracts, and other means. Blockchain stores each transaction data on each transaction node to make the data public and transparent, and generates the data into a blockchain.. As a relatively new distributed database system, blockchain has expanded to many other fields since the initial digital currency, but its development is seriously constrained by problems such as large storage overhead and low query efficiency. In order to find a suita-ble optimization method, select the representative blockchain system Bitcoin, analyze its data structure, data storage and data query processing mechanism, discuss the problems existing in the two functions of storage and query, summarize the existing relevant optimization methods, and look forward to the main research problems of the blockchain system represented by Bitcoin in the future.
With the increasing acceptance and utilization of blockchain technology, a multitude of blockchain-based systems have emerged. Consequently, the need for interoperability among these systems has become paramount, particularly in a trustless manner. To enable decentralized and secure cross-chain applications for users, the establishment of a trust-minimized interoperability solution is imperative for homogeneous blockchain-based networks. This paper presents an analysis of the current state and challenges associated with interoperability between blockchain-based systems. Building upon previous research, we propose that the set of blockchain-based networks should be narrowed down based on the same settlement layer for supporting trust-minimized interoperability. Specifically, we concentrate on the cross-rollup functionality between rollups. We have devised and implemented two similar solutions to address the aforementioned interoperability problem, employing a trust-minimized optimistic approach. Through extensive experimentation, we compare our proposed solutions with existing cross-rollup bridges in terms of gas consumption, time complexity, and newly introduced trust assumptions. Our experimental investigations concentrate on the transmission of arbitrary data utilizing non-fungible tokens. The results reveal that one of our proposed solutions offers an optimal approach for cross-rollup communication between optimistic rollups.
Zhen Zhang, Bingqiao Luo, Shengliang Lu, Bingsheng He
Numerous studies have been conducted to investigate the properties of large-scale temporal graphs. Despite the ubiquity of these graphs in real-world scenarios, it's usually impractical for us to obtain the whole real-time graphs due to privacy concerns and technical limitations. In this paper, we introduce the concept of {\it Live Graph Lab} for temporal graphs, which enables open, dynamic and real transaction graphs from blockchains. Among them, Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have become one of the most prominent parts of blockchain over the past several years. With more than \$40 billion market capitalization, this decentralized ecosystem produces massive, anonymous and real transaction activities, which naturally forms a complicated transaction network. However, there is limited understanding about the characteristics of this emerging NFT ecosystem from a temporal graph analysis perspective. To mitigate this gap, we instantiate a live graph with NFT transaction network and investigate its dynamics to provide new observations and insights. Specifically, through downloading and parsing the NFT transaction activities, we obtain a temporal graph with more than 4.5 million nodes and 124 million edges. Then, a series of measurements are presented to understand the properties of the NFT ecosystem. Through comparisons with social, citation, and web networks, our analyses give intriguing findings and point out potential directions for future exploration. Finally, we also study machine learning models in this live graph to enrich the current datasets and provide new opportunities for the graph community. The source codes and dataset are available at https://livegraphlab.github.io.
Jongbeen Han, Yunhyeong Seo, Sangjin Lee, Sunggon Kim · 5 authors
A blockchain is designed to establish consistent and reliable agreements in an untrusted and decentralized environment. In addition, the blockchain enables transaction processing and the creation of smart contracts. It empowers end users to execute contracts without any intermediate entities. However, there are some issues when it comes to retrieving information, such as the state and history of smart contracts and regular transactions in the blockchain. For example, in a smart contract, user-defined data structures can be used to recall the state of the smart contract for a range query, which can decrease the general performance. In addition, an external database can be required to retrieve regular transactions for range queries, which increases management costs. To achieve this, we propose a new scheme that enables SQL query operations to retrieve a smart contract and regular transaction information within the blockchain system. To achieve this, we combine an embedded relational database with an Ethereum-based blockchain system to provide the SQL query. It enables range queries on smart contracts without requiring user-defined data structures and decreases management costs for regular transactions without any external database. We implement the proposed blockchain system on quorum, which is an Ethereum-based blockchain system. Also, we evaluate the proposed system using a synthetic benchmark. The performance of retrieving smart contract data is improved by up to approximately 22×, with low memory usage compared with the existing system. Moreover, the proposed system demonstrates a similar search performance to the existing system, even when considering external databases in regular transactions.
To enhance security and confidentiality in P2P communication, we implement a blockchain-enabled system of identity management and mutual authentication protocol, Be-Mutual. It provides user-centric identity management based on blockchain addresses and employs mutual authentication based on asymmetric encryption to prevent unauthorized access. We address the complexity of blockchain addresses, a significant chal-lenge in real-world applications such as Decentralized Physical Infrastructure (DePIN) and Decentralized Wireless (DeWi), by integrating the Blockchain-enabled Domain Name System (Be-DNS) into BeMutual. BeDNS maps complex blockchain addresses to easy-to-remember domain names, improving user experience without sacrificing security. The proposed BeMutual system, combining blockchain-based identity management, mutual authentication, and domain name resolution, offers a pioneering solution for secure and user-friendly P2P communication in decentralized environments.
Transactive Energy Markets (TEM) have the potential to reduce wasted energy, increase the utilisation of renewable energy resources and enable independence in the energy sector. Blockchain has been utilised in TEMs in the literature aiming to acquire transparency, security and trustless operations. Though public blockhain enables leveraged transparency and fairness, the majority of proposals suggest adoption of private or consortium blockchains mainly due to performance concerns. In this paper, we created a TEM environment where consumers, prosumers and suppliers bid for price agreement upon a game theory model and then deployed it on localised Ethereum blockchain infrastructure. To compare the performance, we created a centralized TEM environment keeping all the settings the same. The obtained results show that public blockchains may be adaptable to TEMs to enhance system transparency and fairness as well as automated and trustless transactions. Conducted test results show that our proposal exhibit a similar scalability trend as the referenced centralized system.
Nischal Aryal, Fariba Ghaffari, E. Bertin, Noël Crespi
The Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) introduces openness and intelligence into the existing, tightly-coupled RAN ecosystem. Openness promotes collaboration among various vendors to provide diverse components (hardware, software, or both) for the RAN ecosystem, while intelligence handles complex network activities using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Although O-RAN design addresses many issues in traditional RANs, such as vendor lock-in, lack of flexibility, and limited innovation, it raises several management and security concerns related to collaboration, access management, privacy, trust, and availability. Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) offer a viable method of establishing trust among entities, managing resources efficiently, and automating complex network tasks. Several DLT properties, such as distributed architecture, high automation through smart contracts, immutability, and transparency, could position DLT-based ideas as game changers in a multi-vendor O-RAN ecosystem. Furthermore, this technology has the potential to introduce new business models and establish secure and trusted micro-payments among vendors and network participants. In this paper, we first present a taxonomy for discussing existing O-RAN challenges. Based on the taxonomy, we then examine the possibility of incorporating DLT-based solutions in O-RAN architecture to address these challenges.
Early open blockchain designs face low throughput, high latency, and prohibitive costs for setting up a full node. New designs improve this with innovative mechanisms for handling transactions and the blockchain state, often assuming locality properties in the workload of transactions. Temporal locality allows efficient space management such as light nodes or snapshot-based bootstrap. Disjoint access parallelism, which depends on spatial locality, enables parallel processing of non-conflicting transactions. We analyze locality properties and their interplay in the largest transactional workload available to date, that of Ethereum. Our results show that, although transactions generally display good locality, a minority of accounts are responsible for caching- or parallelism-unfriendliness, calling for specific identification and handling in future blockchain designs.
Dinesh Kumar K, N. Duraimutharasan, H J Shanthi, G. Vennila · 6 authors
Blockchain technology garners significant attention and recognition due to several key advantages it offers. Trust, reliability, speed, and transparency are among the prominent benefits that contribute to its growing prominence. The decentralized nature of blockchain allows for a high level of trust as transactions are recorded and verified by multiple participants across the network. This, in turn, enhances reliability as there is no single point of failure. Speed is also a notable advantage, particularly when compared to traditional systems that involve intermediaries and complex processes for verification. Blockchain enables faster and more efficient transaction processing, reducing delays and costs. This research paper aims to provide a comprehensive comparative analysis of two prominent distributed ledger technologies, namely blockchain and hashgraph. Both blockchain and hashgraph offer decentralized and secure systems for recording and validating transactions or information. It explores the underlying mechanisms, consensus algorithms, advantages, and limitations of these technologies. It also examines their potential applications and discusses the implications of their respective design choices. By understanding the nuances of blockchain and hashgraph, seeks to contribute to the ongoing discourse on distributed ledger technologies and aids in decision-making for their appropriate adoption in various domains and applications.
Abstract As a distributed ledger technology, blockchain's low throughput is challenging to support large‐scale applications. Sharding is one way to solve this problem, but the security of existing sharded blockchains is not enough. In addition, with the increase of time, the node storage pressure in the shard will also increase. Therefore, SLChain was proposed as a secure and low storage pressure sharding blockchain. SLChain works together between shards for block validation to avoid inconsistencies caused by a single shard being controlled by adversaries. As well as by relying on a reputation‐established confirmation committee that allows blocks to be confirmed quickly and without forking. In addition, a secure ledger pruning mechanism is designed to make the space required for nodes grow very slowly over time, reducing the storage pressure on nodes. The results show that SLChain can improve security and throughput, and the node storage pressure is small.
Logging is a critical function to enable auditing and enhance security of distributed applications. This paper describes the design of Mnemosyne, a distributed logger running over Named Data Networking(NDN), to meet this need for NDN-based distributed applications. Mnemosyne assures the immutability of logged events by interlocking all event records in a DAG-based ledger. Mnemosyne provides a high logging throughput and system resiliency against network component failures. We implemented Mnemosyne and evaluated its design through an emulated deployment setting.
The emergence of distributed energy and prosumers has greatly promoted the reform of the energy market. Blockchain technology provides a very potent solution for distributed energy transactions, however, blockchain technology still develops slowly in the energy field due to the unstable performance of the imperfect system. This paper aims to narrow this gap by the following steps. First, a function-driven integration method is proposed to combine the merit of blockchain distributed ledger and traditional centralized databases. Then a hybrid energy blockchain system architecture is designed, including the blockchain layer, smart contract layer, database layer, and client layer. Further, a peer-to-peer market mechanism considering energy storage arbitrage and fully automated matchmaking is developed on the hybrid blockchain system. The case study proves the effectiveness and safety of the system. The proposed architecture of combined blockchain and database technologies effectively paves the way for constructing a more reasonable and feasible distributed energy trading platform.
Leonhard Balduf, Maciej Korczyński, Onur Ascigil, Navin V. Keizer · 7 authors
Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS) is one of the largest peer-to-peer filesystems in operation. The network is the default storage layer for Web3 and is being presented as a solution to the centralization of the web. In this paper, we present a large-scale, multi-modal measurement study of the IPFS network. We analyze the topology, the traffic, the content providers and the entry points from the classical Internet. Our measurements show significant centralization in the IPFS network and a high share of nodes hosted in the cloud. We also shed light on the main stakeholders in the ecosystem. We discuss key challenges that might disrupt continuing efforts to decentralize the Web and highlight multiple properties that are creating pressures toward centralization.
In spite of multiple advantages of the adoption of blockchain (BC), it still faces some integration challenges in modern applications, such as the Internet of Things. These challenges include low throughput rates in permissionless settings. To solve this challenge, several state-of-the-art works proposed sharding (i.e., partitioning) the BC infrastructure. Sharding the network into smaller shards improves the total system throughput, regardless of the node-shard assignment criteria. Most previous work applied a Random Sharding (RS) approach, i.e., randomly allocating nodes into predefined shards, to satisfy the required unpredictability property of node-shard allocation. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain Optimized and Secure Sharding (BOSS) protocol that aims to optimize the node-shard allocation resulting in increased throughput using a variant of the evolutionary Genetic Algorithm. The RS-equivalent levels of security and unpredictability are guaranteed by deploying a distributed random tuning mechanism for the intra-shard weight. We designed BOSS as an extension of the well-defined RS-based RapidChain protocol. We show that the proposed methods can be adapted to other sharding protocols that originally used RS techniques. We implemented and tested our protocol with more than 362,880 cases that covered seven configurable system and optimization parameters. Our evaluation revealed ≈17% average enhancement in scalability, along with a negligible <0.5% mean absolute difference in security levels. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that optimizes inter- and intra-shard scalability, with publicly verifiable solutions in permissionless BCs, while maintaining RS-equivalent security and unpredictability.
Mikel Cortes-Goicoechea, Tarun Mohandas-Daryanani, José L. Muñoz, Leonardo Bautista-Gomez
Modern public blockchains like Ethereum rely on p2p networks to run distributed and censorship-resistant applications. With its wide adoption, it operates as a highly critical public ledger. On its transition to become more scalable and sustainable, shifting to PoS without sacrificing the security and resilience of PoW, Ethereum offers a range of consensus clients to participate in the network. In this paper, we present a methodology to measure the performance of the consensus clients based on the latency to receive messages from the p2p network. The paper includes a study that identifies the incentives and limitations that the network experiences, presenting insights about the latency impact derived from running the software in different locations.
Consensus algorithms are the core technology of a blockchain and directly affect the implementation and application of blockchain systems. Delegated proof of stake (DPoS) significantly reduces the time required for transaction verification by selecting representative nodes to generate blocks, and it has become a mainstream consensus algorithm. However, existing DPoS algorithms have issues such as "one ballot, one vote", a low degree of decentralization, and nodes performing malicious actions. To address these problems, an improved DPoS algorithm based on community discovery is designed, called CD-DPoS. First, we introduce the PageRank algorithm to improve the voting mechanism, achieving "one ballot, multiple votes", and we obtain the reputation value of each node. Second, we propose a node voting enthusiasm measurement method based on the GN algorithm. Finally, we design a comprehensive election mechanism combining node reputation values and voting enthusiasm to select secure and reliable accounting nodes. A node credit incentive mechanism is also designed to effectively motivate normal nodes and drive out malicious nodes. The experimental simulation results show that our proposed algorithm has better decentralization, malicious node eviction capabilities and higher throughput than similar methods.