Ethereum’s transaction pool (mempool) dynamics and fee market efficiency critically affect transaction inclusion, validator workload, and overall network performance. This research empirically analyzes gas price variations, mempool clearance rates, and block finalization times in Ethereum’s proof-of-stake ecosystem using real-time data from Geth and Prysm nodes. We observe that high-fee transactions are consistently prioritized, while low-fee transactions face delays or exclusion—despite EIP-1559’s intended improvements. Mempool congestion remains a key factor in validator efficiency and proposal latency. We provide empirical evidence of persistent fee-based disparities and show that extremely high fees do not always guarantee faster confirmation, revealing inefficiencies in the current fee market. To address these issues, we propose congestion-aware fee adjustments, reserved block slots for low-fee transactions, and improved handling of out-of-gas vulnerabilities. By mitigating prioritization bias and execution inefficiencies, our findings support more equitable transaction inclusion, enhance validator performance, and promote scalability. This work contributes to Ethereum’s long-term decentralization by reducing dependence on high transaction fees for network participation.
Michael D. Norman, Simon Brown, Mallesh M. Pai, Laurence Smith
This paper presents a novel staking coopetition design aimed at incentivizing decentralization and continuous growth of economic security within a proof-of-stake system. Staking rewards follow a nonlinear mapping relative to stake size. This affords the highest effective yields to smaller operators, fueling network growth and giving users an incentive to delegate their stake to smaller operators. This prevents the preferential accrual and centralization of stake seen in popular blockchains such as Ethereum, where popular liquid staking protocols control large fractions of the total stake thereby having outsized potential impacts on the economic security of the protocol. The proposed system addresses key challenges such as Sybil attacks and offers a comprehensive framework for future research and implementation. We introduce innovative mechanisms and gamification elements, to enhance user engagement and provide transparency in emissions.
ABSTRACT The emergence of wireless technology brought about enhanced communication across various devices, resulting in the demand for efficient and reliable wireless networks, like wireless mesh networks (WMNs) and mobile Ad‐hoc Networks (MANETs). MANETs are known for their decentralized nature, rapid deployment, infrastructure‐less operation, adaptability, and ease of use in several applications and outdoor events. Despite their flexibility, they often face challenges relating to security vulnerabilities, together with blackhole and grayhole attacks, and trade‐offs in terms of performance relating to reliability and integrity. This paper proposes an improved, innovative routing protocol for Ad‐hoc On‐Demand Distance Vector (AODV) by infusion of blockchain's proof of stake (PoS) consensus mechanism named PoSAODV, whose objective is to enhance security, energy‐efficiency, and adaptability while reducing packet loss rate, routing overheads, and increasing throughput. Smart contract‐based validator selection was utilized to ensure fairness and reduce blackhole and grayhole attacks. The result obtained through simulation demonstrates that PoSAODV outperforms the original AODV by reduced latency of 0.79 ms , average throughput of 45 Mbps , and packet delivery ratio of 80%–100% in both unsafe and safe environments. This makes PoSAODV suitable for resource‐constrained ad‐hoc networks with dynamic topologies.
Ethereum has adopted a rollup-centric roadmap to scale by making rollups (layer 2 scaling solutions) the primary method for handling transactions. The first significant step towards this goal was EIP-4844, which introduced blob transactions that are designed to meet the data availability needs of layer 2 protocols. This work constitutes the first rigorous and comprehensive empirical analysis of transaction- and mempool-level data since the institution of blobs on Ethereum on March 13, 2024. We perform a longitudinal study of the early days of the blob fee market analyzing the landscape and the behaviors of its participants. We identify and measure the inefficiencies arising out of suboptimal block packing, showing that at times it has resulted in up to 70% relative fee loss. We hone in and give further insight into two (congested) peak demand periods for blobs. Finally, we document a market design issue relating to subset bidding due to the inflexibility of the transaction structure on packing data as blobs and suggest possible ways to fix it. The latter market structure issue also applies more generally for any discrete objects included within transactions.
Decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs) are an emerging vertical within "Web3" replacing the traditional method that physical infrastructures are constructed. Yet, the boundaries between DePIN and traditional method of building crowd-sourced infrastructures such as citizen science initiatives or other Web3 verticals are not always so clear cut. In this work, we systematically analyze the differences between DePIN and other Web2 and Web3 verticals. For this, the study proposes a novel decision tree for classifying systems as DePIN. This tree is informed by prior studies and differentiates DePIN from related concepts using criteria such as the presence of a three-sided market, token-based incentives for supply, and the requirement for physical asset placement in those systems. The paper demonstrates the application of the decision tree to various blockchain systems, including Helium and Bitcoin, showcasing its practical utility in differentiating DePIN systems. This research offers significant contributions towards establishing a more objective and systematic approach to identifying and categorizing DePIN systems. It lays the groundwork for creating a comprehensive and unbiased database of DePIN systems, which will inform future research and development within this emerging sector.
Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap assumes that adoption of layer-2 (L2) rollups will relieve congestion on the layer-1 (L1) mainnet, but there is little causal evidence on how large that relief is across major protocol changes. We construct a daily panel for Ethereum from August 2021 to December 2024 and estimate the total effect of L2 adoption on L1 congestion using a regime-aware interrupted time-series design that spans the London, Merge, and Dencun upgrades and adjusts for macro demand. In the pre-Dencun regime, a 10 percentage point increase in L2 adoption reduces median L1 base fees by about 11%—roughly 4–5 Gwei per 21k-gas transfer—and yields similar declines in a harmonized congestion index, with only modest changes in block utilization. Combining these elasticities with a Merge-era counterfactual path for L2 adoption, we estimate that observed adoption avoided about $80–$90 million in base and priority fees over 137 days, or roughly $0.6–$0.7 million per day. These effects are precise while L2 adoption is still ramping up but become statistically local once adoption exceeds 85% after Dencun, implying that congestion relief is economically meaningful yet regime-specific. Our findings support continued investment in L2 infrastructure alongside L1 mechanism design and illustrate how to benchmark congestion relief in other multi-layer digital platforms.
This paper presents a multi-contract blockchain framework for inter-provider agreements in 6G networks, emphasizing performance analysis under a realistic Proof-of-Stake (PoS) setting on Ethereum's Sepolia testnet. We begin by quantifying Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-based gas usage for critical operations such as provider registration, service addition, and SLA penalty enforcement, observing that cold writes and deep data structures can each inflate gas consumption by up to 20\%. We then examine block-level dynamics when multiple transactions execute concurrently, revealing that moderate concurrency (e.g., 30--50 simultaneous transactions) can fill blocks to 80--90\% of their gas limit and nearly double finalization times from around 15~seconds to over 30~seconds. Finally, we synthesize these insights into a practical design guide, demonstrating that flattening nested mappings, consolidating storage writes, and selectively timing high-impact transactions can markedly reduce costs and latency spikes. Collectively, our findings underscore the importance of EVM-specific optimizations and transaction scheduling for large-scale decentralized applications in 6G telecom scenarios. The implementation is available online.
Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
Decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) is currently one of the hottest narratives in Web3. In this paper, we present a new thesis of DePIN, namely the modular DePIN infrastructure. By retrospecting the evolution of software development platforms for building physical infrastructure networks, we describe the new technology trend of building DePIN applications on top of a community-owned modular DePIN infrastructure and highlight the characteristics of this new DePIN thesis from both technical and economic perspectives. In particular, the emerging modular DePIN infrastructure brings a number of research challenges that need to be further addressed through collaboration between academia and industry.
En el ecosistema de las aplicaciones descentralizadas (DApps), la dependencia de un único nodo de blockchain para realizar todas las transacciones presenta varios desafíos críticos, entre ellos la falta de redundancia y la potencial inestabilidad en caso de fallos en dicho nodo. Este problema subraya la necesidad de un sistema que permita la configuración y monitoreo de múltiples nodos, asegurando una alta disponibilidad y un equilibrio de carga eficiente. El presente Trabajo de Final de Grado, titulado "HIGH AVAILABILITY ETHEREUM-LIKE NODE PROXY", aborda esta problemática proponiendo una solución basada en una aplicación desarrollada en Python para monitorear y equilibrar el tráfico entre varios nodos Ethereum JSON-RPC.
Centralized cloud storage, computing, and processing can not fulfill the quality of service (QoS), e.g., high bandwidth and low latency, at reduced costs to emerging applications, such as virtual reality, smart transportation, etc. This paper proposes a hybrid computing framework that can use the best of cloud, fog, and edge capabilities and can be tailored to the needs of applications. Note that fog and edge computing infrastructures, designed for proximity to users, have emerged as promising complements to traditional cloud computing. While fiber access networks can offer QoS to end users connected over fixed devices, an integrated fiber-wireless access network can fulfill mobile end-users requirements. Our framework integrates artificial intelligence techniques for resource optimization, control, and monitoring, among other tasks. Furthermore, we envision that edge devices and sensors, together with fog and cloud, can utilize a distributed ledger technology, such as Blockchain, to establish a trust-based relationship. Finally, we present a use case of hybrid computing over a distributed fiber-wireless network enabled by AI and Blockchain. We show that hybrid computing is essential in balancing a tradeoff between communication latency to generate alert signals and minimizing the power consumption of a system.
One of the core technologies facilitating interaction today is the internet, and so the question of how much this technology must evolve is inevitable. Cue in the Web3 debate.
An Elastic Optical Network (EON) nowadays usually accommodates multiple Virtual Optical Networks (VON) by allocating orthogonal spectrum resources for them. A fixed resource allocation pattern may result in a low quality of service since data traffic on VONs may fluctuate with time. Spectrum trading (ST) among VONs could solve this problem by moving spectrum resources between them and blockchain-based ST has recently gained much interest since it avoids the traditional centralization concern. In this paper, we propose a smart contract based decentralized ST scheme for VONs. The system is built on a private blockchain which can be implemented with the off-shelf Ethereum platform at a low development cost. A frequency slot (FS) trading contract (FSTC) is designed to trade unoccupied spectrum resources among VONs. Compared with existing schemes, FSTC explicitly addresses the virtual link brokerage (VLB) problem by trading in the granularity of virtual links. Furthermore, FSTC ensures FS information authenticity and enables FS recyclability via mechanisms based on Ethereum smart contract features. We implement FSTC with Solidity and evaluate its costs which demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed solution.
Infrastructure sharing has always been a core aspect of telecommunications networks, especially in the access. The move towards resource-demanding services, which are part of the 5G evolution, further exacerbates its necessity, as the cost of ownership is often not matched by an increase in revenue. In parallel, the recent emergence of network function virtualization is creating new business opportunities and business models that challenge conventional centralized network ownership. In this work, we address the issue of optical access network sharing, addressing the challenging scenario of the untrusted broadband market. We propose, for the first time, to our knowledge, a distributed market scheme for capacity sharing that makes use of permissioned blockchain technology in multi-tenant passive optical networks. The blockchain is used as a verification mechanism that runs in parallel to shared, market-based capacity scheduling operations. To study the feasibility and performance of the proposed verification layer, we have developed a smart contract (chaincodes) using the Hyperledger Fabric permissioned blockchain platform that solves the high transaction cost and energy consumption concerns associated with permissionless blockchain solutions used in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Pol Alemany, Ricard Vilalta, Raül Muñoz, Ramon Casellas · 5 authors
Data center (DC) interconnection allows us to have optical transmissions between DCs directly connected to optical networks, avoiding the use of a packet-based infrastructure. Thanks to the use of next-generation pluggable coherent optics, it is possible to create connectivity services (CSs) across multiple optical transport domains. In this multi-domain CS scenario, cloud operators and transport operators have to work together in the most dynamic way possible. To do so, they need a common place (i.e., a market) where the transport operators may expose their available optical resources and the cloud operators request (e.g., rent) them to be used in order to create end-to-end (E2E) CSs between DCs. Having multiple transport operators exposing their resource information in a common place requires a set of common rules (i.e., how much of the topology to show) to create E2E CSs requested between cloud operators. This paper makes use of the blockchain technology to present a blockchain-based extension for the software-defined network (SDN) architecture to allow each optical transport operator domain to become a peer in a blockchain network. In there, each peer follows the same rules and shares the same exact level of topology information by using a specific abstraction model to map the optical domain resources. This paper uses a set of three different abstraction models to validate their behavior on a blockchain system when managing multiple domain resources and the deployment of CSs across these domains. To do so, an experimental comparison on how the different abstraction models affect the performance of the blockchain system is presented.
Bitcoin's throughput is far lower than those of centralized systems such as Visa and PayPal. To handle a comparable number of transactions, Bitcoin's throughput must be improved, which will require a reduction in the block propagation time. Relay networks have attracted attention as a method to improve throughput. However, the nature and strength of the effects of relay networks are not yet clear. In particular, the effects on individual nodes have received little attention. Thus, this study aims to investigate the effects of relay networks on the Bitcoin network and its nodes under the current network state in approximately 2019. We simulate a relay network under the current network state because simulation is virtually the only way to obtain data for all nodes. A major contribution of this study is that it is the first to investigate the relay network effect on the 90th percentile of block propagation time. Moreover, this study shows that relay networks benefit not only the system but also the nodes utilizing them. The utilizing nodes' blocks were more than six times more likely to be approved as valid blocks when nonutilizing and utilizing nodes generated blocks simultaneously. This finding can motivate the use of nodes in relay networks.
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Caching and Content Delivery
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Mohammed Amine Togou, Ting Bi, Kapal Dev, Kevin McDonnell · 7 authors
5G technology is expected to enable a plethora of new applications with distinct requirements. Provisioning resources to accommodate such applications implies having a flexible network infrastructure that can be tailored to the specific needs of each application. This can be achieved through network slicing. Still, several applications might request network slices, but their request may not be fulfilled due to lack of resources or lack of coverage and provisioning such resources is a cumbersome task. This paper describes an architecture that facilitates the dynamic leasing of resources among network operators to support cross-domain services. The cornerstone of this architecture is a brokering layer, called DBB, that relies on a blockchain-based bidding system to request resources and evaluate resource provisioning offers. The paper also presents a simulation-based use case scenario that illustrates the need for DBB and which was used to evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture.
Current permissionless cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin suffer from a limited transaction rate and slow confirmation time, which hinders further adoption. Payment channels are one of the most promising solutions to address these problems, as they allow the parties of the channel to perform arbitrarily many payments in a peer-to-peer fashion while uploading only two transactions on the blockchain. This concept has been generalized into payment channel networks where a path of payment channels is used to settle the payment between two users that might not share a direct channel between them. However, this approach requires the active involvement of each user in the path, making the system less reliable (they might be offline), more expensive (they charge fees per payment), and slower (intermediaries need to be actively involved in the payment). To mitigate this issue, recent work has introduced the concept of virtual channels (IEEE S&P’19), which involve intermediaries only in the initial creation of a bridge between payer and payee, who can later on independently perform arbitrarily many off-chain transactions. Unfortunately, existing constructions are only available for Ethereum, as they rely on its account model and Turing-complete scripting language. The realization of virtual channels in other blockchain technologies with limited scripting capabilities, like Bitcoin, was so far considered an open challenge.In this work, we present the first virtual channel protocols that are built on the UTXO-model and require a scripting language supporting only a digital signature scheme and a timelock functionality, being thus backward compatible with virtually every cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin. We formalize the security properties of virtual channels as an ideal functionality in the Universal Composability framework and prove that our protocol constitutes a secure realization thereof. We have prototyped and evaluated our protocol on the Bitcoin blockchain, demonstrating its efficiency: for n sequential payments, they require an off-chain exchange of 9+2n transactions or a total of 3524+695n bytes, with no on-chain footprint in the optimistic case. This is a substantial improvement compared to routing payments in a payment channel network, which requires 8n transactions with a total of 3026n bytes to be exchanged.
Shifeng Ding, Gangxiang Shen, Kevin X. Pan, Sanjay K. Bose · 6 authors
In communication networks, network virtualization can usually provide better capacity utilization and quality of service (QoS) than what can be achieved otherwise. Under this operation, once the capacity of a virtual optical network (VON) is allocated, it will be static for a certain period, for example, a service contract period. However, in reality, the actual traffic demand of a VON always fluctuates, which would lead to a mismatch between the capacity assigned and the actual traffic demand carried. This mismatch would further cause degradation of provisioned network services and inefficiency in assigned network capacity. To overcome this issue, we propose a new scheme, called spectrum trading (ST), to trade spectrum resources between VONs in the context of an elastic optical network (EON). The key idea is to allow different VONs to trade their spectrum resources according to their actual capacity requirement at different time instants. A VON with unused spectra can trade away its unused spectra to other VONs that are short of spectrum resources at that time. in exchange, it is rewarded with some credit for its contribution to the ST community, which it can then use later to obtain extra capacity, if needed. The trust-worthiness of the trading records between the VONs is ensured in a distributed fashion through a blockchain- assisted ledger that is updated whenever a new trade occurs. A software-defined control plane is also developed to enable spectrum trading with the support of the blockchain-assisted ledger. The performance of the ST scheme is evaluated and compared with the scenario without such trading. Results show that the proposed ST scheme is efficient in improving the QoS of each VON and significantly improves overall network capacity utilization.
The past decade has witnessed an explosive growth in cryptocurrencies, but the blockchain-based cryptocurrencies have also raised many concerns, among which a crucial one is the scalability issue. Suffering from the large overhead of global consensus and security assurance, even the leading cryptocurrencies can only handle up to tens of transactions per second, which largely limits their applications in real-world scenarios. Among many proposals to improve the cryptocurrency scalability, one of the most promising and mature solutions is the payment channel network (PCN), which offers the off-chain settlement of transactions with minimal involvement of expensive blockchain operations. However, transaction failures may occur due to external attacks or unexpected conditions, e.g., an uncooperative user becoming unresponsive. In this paper, we present a distributed robust payment routing protocol RobustPay to resist transaction failures, which achieves robustness, efficiency and distributedness. Moreover, we modify the original HTLC protocol and adapt it to the robust payment routing protocol.
Yoshitomi Eduardo Maehara Aliaga, Diego Fernandes Gonçalves Martins, Marco Aurélio Amaral Henriques
Neste trabalho apresentamos uma proposta mecanismo de consenso para blockchain baseado em PoS, que viabiliza a participação de usuários de uma maneira mais justa. Através da utilização de tempo discreto o protocolo utiliza rodadas, onde apenas participantes que passaram no desafio da rodada possam gerar o bloco. O protocolo garante uma participação mais igualitária pois não é possível gerar o bloco antes da próxima rodada esperada.
Software defined optical networking (SDON) is a critical technology for the next generation network with the advantages of programmable control and etc. As one of the key issues of SDON, the security of control plane has also received extensive attention, especially in certain network scenarios with high security requirement. Due to the existence of vulnerabilities and heavy overhead, the existing firewalls and distributed control technologies cannot solve the control plane security problem well. In this paper, we propose a distributed control architecture for SDON using the blockchain technique (BlockCtrl). The proposed BlockCtrl model introduces the advantages of blockchain into SDON to achieve a high-efficiency fault tolerant control. We have evaluated the performance of our proposed architecture and compared it to the existing models with respect to various metrics including processing rate, recovery latency and etc. The numerical results show that the BlockCtrl is capable of attacks detection and fault tolerant control in SDON with high performance on resource utilization and service correlation.
This paper presents a blockchain-based high-efficiency security strategy with blockchain ledger-based recovery algorithm for software-defined optical networks. Numerical results show the proposed strategy has less recovery latency and superior network performances.
The goal of this research is to estimate the data propagation time on the Bitcoin network. Using network coordinates, we estimate the communication latency between computers. Such latency estimation contributes future optimization of data propagation. In this research, we report an experiment on computing the network coordinates. In the current Bitcoin network, it is very difficult to acquire internode delay because the network topology is not available. In this study, we calculate the delay based on our topology estimation and describe the effectiveness of the network coordinates using various topology estimation parameters.