Blockchain Papers

Bharat Bhushan, Aditya Khamparia, K. Martin Sagayam, Sudhir Kumar Sharma · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Furqan Jameel, Muhammad Awais Javed, Sherali Zeadally, Riku Jäntti

Cellular vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication is expected to herald the age of autonomous vehicles in the coming years. With the integration of blockchain in such networks, information of all granularity levels, from complete blocks to individual transactions, would be accessible to vehicles at any time. Specifically, the blockchain technology is expected to improve the security, immutability, and decentralization of cellular V2X communication through smart contract and distributed ledgers. Although blockchain-based cellular V2X networks hold promise, many challenges need to be addressed to enable the future interoperability and accessibility of such large-scale platforms. One such challenge is the offloading of mining tasks in cellular V2X networks. While transportation authorities may try to balance the network mining load, the vehicles may select the nearest mining clusters to offload a task. This may cause congestion and disproportionate use of vehicular network resources. To address this issue, we propose a game-theoretic approach for balancing the load at mining clusters while maintaining fairness among offloading vehicles. Keeping in mind the low-latency requirements of vehicles, we consider a finite channel blocklength transmission which is more practical compared to the use of infinite blocklength codes. The simulation results obtained with our proposed offloading framework show improved performance over the conventional nearest mining cluster selection technique.

Jinyue Song, Tianbo Gu, Yunjie Ge, Prasant Mohapatra

In recent years, there is an emerging trend that some computing services are moving from cloud to the edge of the networks. Compared to cloud computing, edge computing can provide services with faster response, lower expense, and more security. The massive idle computing resources closing to the edge also enhance the deployment of edge services. Instead of using cloud services from some primary providers, edge computing provides people with a great chance to actively join the market of computing resources. However, edge computing also has some critical impediments that we have to overcome. In this paper, we design an edge computing service platform that can receive and distribute the computing resources from the end-users in a decentralized way. Without centralized trade control, we propose a novel hierarchical smart contract-based decentralized technique to establish the trading trust among users and provide flexible smart contract interfaces to satisfy users. Our system also considers and resolves a variety of security and privacy challenges when utilizing the encryption and distributed access control mechanism. We implement our system and conduct extensive experiments to show the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed system.

Ali Alzubaidi, Karan Mitra, Pankesh Patel, Ellis Solaiman

Within cloud-based internet of things (IoT) applications, typically cloud providers employ Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to ensure the quality of their provisioned services. Similar to any other contractual method, an SLA is not immune to breaches. Ideally, an SLA stipulates consequences (e.g. penalties) imposed on cloud providers when they fail to conform to SLA terms. The current practice assumes trust in service providers to acknowledge SLA breach incidents and executing associated consequences. Recently, the Blockchain paradigm has introduced compelling capabilities that may enable us to address SLA enforcement more elegantly. This paper proposes and implements a blockchain-based approach for assessing SLA compliance and enforcing consequences. It employs a diagnostic accuracy method for validating the dependability of the proposed solution. The paper also benchmarks Hyperledger Fabric to investigate its feasibility as an underlying blockchain infrastructure concerning latency and transaction success/fail rates.

Jui-Chan Huang, Ming‐Hung Shu, Bi‐Min Hsu, Chien-Ming Hu

No abstract is available for this record.

Zeinab Shahbazi, Yung-Cheol Byun

The emergence of biomedical sensor devices, wireless communication, and innovation in other technologies for healthcare applications result in the evolution of a new area of research that is termed as Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). WBAN originates from Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), which are used for implementing many healthcare systems integrated with networks and wireless devices to ensure remote healthcare monitoring. WBAN is a network of wearable devices implanted in or on the human body. The main aim of WBAN is to collect the human vital signs/physiological data (like ECG, body temperature, EMG, glucose level, etc.) round-the-clock from patients that demand secure, optimal and efficient routing techniques. The efficient, secure, and reliable designing of routing protocol is a difficult task in WBAN due to its diverse characteristic and restraints, such as energy consumption and temperature-rise of implanted sensors. The two significant constraints, overheating of nodes and energy efficiency must be taken into account while designing a reliable blockchain-enabled WBAN routing protocol. The purpose of this study is to achieve stability and efficiency in the routing of WBAN through managing temperature and energy limitations. Moreover, the blockchain provides security, transparency, and lightweight solution for the interoperability of physiological data with other medical personnel in the healthcare ecosystem. In this research work, the blockchain-based Adaptive Thermal-/Energy-Aware Routing (ATEAR) protocol for WBAN is proposed. Temperature rise, energy consumption, and throughput are the evaluation metrics considered to analyze the performance of ATEAR for data transmission. In contrast, transaction throughput, latency, and resource utilization are used to investigate the outcome of the blockchain system. Hyperledger Caliper, a benchmarking tool, is used to evaluate the performance of the blockchain system in terms of CPU utilization, memory, and memory utilization. The results show that by preserving residual energy and avoiding overheated nodes as forwarders, high throughput is achieved with the ultimate increase of the network lifetime. Castalia, a simulation tool, is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol, and its comparison is made with Multipath Ring Routing Protocol (MRRP), thermal-aware routing algorithm (TARA), and Shortest-Hop (SHR). Evaluation results illustrate that the proposed protocol performs significantly better in balancing of temperature (to avoid damaging heat effect on the body tissues) and energy consumption (to prevent the replacement of battery and to increase the embedded sensor node life) with efficient data transmission achieving a high throughput value.

Millicent N. Ubaka-Okoye

This paper recommends a blockchain framework that secures the e-learning platform. The proposed framework was used to build a widely manageable and safe data delivery facility that will connect to existing educational data. Institutions can simply have amassed their data history without demanding a copy from central servers. The proposed blockchain framework enhances data security and removes trust concerns amongst users or between third-party institutions accessing applications and services. Data distribution can be used with smart contracts to warranty that institutions will continue to be in control of their data entrance, are alert of the source of collected data sources, and are up-to-date when their data is log on by others. Immutable audit logs are generated through data source and contact history to keep institutions informed of the time their data are retrieved. Blockchain has the potential that could provide a system with massive openness, online secure database that e-learning platforms needed. The blockchain can be implemented on different learning platforms based on the information security policies of the institutions.

Ran Zhang, F. Richard Yu, Jiang Liu, Tao Huang · 5 authors

Device-to-Device (D2D) caching assists Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) based caching in offloading inter-domain traffic by sharing cached items with nearby users, while its performance relies heavily on caching nodes' sharing willingness. In this paper, a Blockchain-based Cache and Delivery Market (CDM) is proposed as an incentive mechanism for the distributed caching system. Under given incentive mechanisms, both D2D and MEC caching nodes' willingness is guaranteed by satisfying their expected reward for cache sharing. Besides, for the distributed CDM, content delivery related transactions are executed by smart contracts. To achieve consensus on transactions and prevent frauds, a consensus protocol among the smart contract execution nodes (SCENE) is necessary. To minimize the latency of reaching consensus while guaranteeing its confidence level, we propose partial Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pPBFT) protocol. Further, the model of cache sharing and transaction execution consensus is proposed, and we further formulate caching placement and SCENE selection as Markov Decision Process problems. Due to the complexity and dynamics of the problems, a deep reinforcement learning approach is adopted to solve the problem. The simulation results show that the proposed schemes outperform conventional solutions in terms of traffic offloading, content retrieval latency, and consensus latency.

Yustus Eko Oktian, Sang-Gon Lee, Hoon Jae Lee

Many researchers challenge the possibility of using blockchain and smart contracts to disrupt the Internet of Things (IoT) architecture because of their security and decentralization guarantees. However, the state-of-the-art blockchain architecture is not scalable enough to satisfy the requirements of massive data traffics in the IoT environment. The main reason for this issue is one needs to choose the consensus trade-off between either coping with a high throughput or a high number of nodes. Consequently, this issue prevents the applicability of blockchain for IoT use cases. In this paper, we propose a scalable two-tiered hierarchical blockchain architecture for IoT. The first tier is a Core Engine, which is based on a Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus to cope with a high throughput, that supervises the underlying subordinate engines (sub-engines) as its second tier. This second tier comprises of the Payment, Compute, and Storage Engine, respectively. We can deploy multiple instances of these sub-engines as many as we need and as local as possible near to the IoT domains, where IoT devices reside, to cope with a high number of nodes. Furthermore, to further extend the scalability of the proposed architecture, we also provide additional scalability features on the Core Engine such as request aggregation, request prioritization, as well as sub-engine parallelism. We implement all of our engines and expose them to IoT applications through the Engine APIs. With these APIs, developers can build and run IoT applications in our architecture. Our evaluation results show that our proposed features on the Core Engine can indeed enhance the overall performance of our architecture. Moreover, based on our proof-of-concept IoT car rental application, we also show that the interoperability between sub-engines through the Core Engine is possible, even when the particular sub-engine is under sub-engine parallelism.

Bakri Awaji, Ellis Solaiman, Adel Albshri

The utilisation of blockchain has moved beyond digital currency to other fields such as health, the Internet of Things, and education. In this paper, we present a systematic mapping study to collect and analyse relevant research on blockchain technology related to the higher education field. The paper concentrates on two main themes. First, it examines state of the art in blockchain-based applications that have been developed for educational purposes. Second, it summarises the challenges and research gaps that need to be addressed in future studies.

Li Peng, Wei Feng, Zheng Yan, Yafeng Li · 6 authors

Permissionless blockchain, as a kind of distributed ledger, has gained considerable attention because of its openness, transparency, decentralization, and immutability. Currently, permissionless blockchain has shown a good application prospect in many fields, from the initial cryptocurrency to the Internet of Things (IoT) and Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networking (VANET), which is considered as the beginning of rewriting our digital infrastructure. However, blockchain confronts some privacy risks that hinder its practical applications. Though numerous surveys reviewed the privacy preservation in blockchain, they failed to reveal the latest advances, nor have they been able to conduct a unified standard comprehensive classification of the privacy protection of permissionless blockchain. Therefore, in this paper, we analyze the specific characteristics of permissionless blockchain, summarize the potential privacy threats, and investigate the unique privacy requirements of blockchain. Existing privacy preservation technologies are carefully surveyed and evaluated based on our proposed evaluation criteria. We finally figure out open research issues as well as future research directions from the perspective of privacy issues.

Furqan Jameel, Uzair Javaid, Wali Ullah Khan, Muhammad Naveed Aman · 6 authors

Blockchain is emerging as a promising candidate for the uberization of Internet services. It is a decentralized, secure, and auditable solution for exchanging, and authenticating information via transactions, without the need of a trusted third party. Therefore, blockchain technology has recently been integrated with industrial Internet-of-things (IIoT) networks to help realize the fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0. Though blockchain-enabled IIoT networks may have the potential to support the services and demands of next-generation networks, the gap analysis presented in this work highlights some of the areas that need improvement. Based on these observations, the article then promotes the utility of reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to address some of the major issues of blockchain-enabled IIoT networks such as block time minimization and transaction throughput enhancement. This is followed by a comprehensive case study where a Q-learning technique is used for minimizing the occurrence of forking events by reducing the transmission delays for a miner. Extensive simulations have been performed and the results have been obtained for the average transmission delay which relates to the forking events. The obtained results demonstrate that the Q-learning approach outperforms the greedy policy while having a reasonable level of complexity. To further develop the blockchain-enabled IIoT networks, some future research directions are also documented. While this article highlights the applications of RL techniques in blockchain-enabled IIoT networks, the provided insights and results could pave the way for rapid adoption of blockchain technology.

Bechir Hamdaoui, Mohamed Alkalbani, Ammar Rayes, Nizar Zorba

We propose a blockchain-based, distributed protocol for enabling the deployment of Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks on-demand on top of IoT devices. Specifically, the proposed protocol leverages blockchain technology to: 1) enable distributed and secure authentication, registration, and management of participatory IoT devices; 2) provide fast discovery of IoT resources and scalable and secure instantiation of IoT networks-on-demand; and 3) manage payment operations and ensure reliable fund transfers among the network entities. The proposed protocol relies on a peer-to-peer network communication infrastructure to allow communications among the IoT devices in a distributed manner and uses a self-recovery/self-healing mechanism to ensure robustness against device failure and maliciousness. The protocol also introduces and uses a reputation system to monitor registered devices to keep track of their service delivery quality so that their service delivery reputations could be leveraged for future device selection and mapping. We implemented and evaluated the proposed protocol intensively using simulations and showed that it scales well with network parameters, is resilient to faulty devices, and is robust to 51% attack.

Víctor Garcia-Font

No abstract is available for this record.

Siming Wang, Dongdong Ye, Xumin Huang, Rong Yu · 6 authors

Vehicular edge computing (VEC) extends edge computing to vehicular networks by exploiting computation resources of vehicles to offload tasks from other vehicles and pedestrians. However, VEC faces several critical challenges such as the potential security issues caused by untrusted and opaque environment and the lack of incentive mechanism under asymmetric information scenario. To solve the above challenges, we propose a consortium blockchain for secure resource sharing in VEC. We first design multi-step smart contracts to achieve secure resource sharing and defend against the malicious behaviours of service requesters and vehicles with selfish purposes. Then, a byzantine fault tolerance-based proof-of-stake (BFT-based PoS) consensus protocol is applied in consortium blockchain to reach consensus efficiently. Furthermore, we design a contract-based incentive mechanism to motivate vehicles to share their computation resources with service requesters. The optimal contracts are derived to maximize the service requesters' expected utility as well as social welfare. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed incentive mechanism is more effective and efficient than the traditional schemes.

Jiamin Fan, Kui Wu, Daming Liu, Guoming Tang

A content delivery network (CDN) uses distributed cache servers to reduce the content delivery latency to end users. In recent years, CDN providers adopt a new content caching strategy that allows end users to share their storage/bandwidth resources. Two core questions need to answer in this strategy: (1) how to incentivize end users to contribute their resources? (2) how to facilitate transparent, secure content trading among end users?We propose a new CDN solution, called SmartSharing, where users contribute their over-the-top (OTT) devices as mini-cache servers. To incentivize end users to contribute resources, SmartSharing uses game theory and an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to determine the content delivery schedule and the pricing scheme. To facilitate content trading among end users, SmartSharing uses smart contracts in Ethereum to create a transparent and safe transaction platform. We thoroughly evaluate the performance of SmartSharing with real-world trace-driven simulation as well as a prototype using content metadata and the derived pricing scheme.

Dongdong Yue, Ruixuan Li, Yan Zhang, Wenlong Tian · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Gaolei Li, Mianxiong Dong, Laurence T. Yang, Kaoru Ota · 6 authors

Edge computational intelligence, integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and edge computing into Internet of Things (IoT), will generate many scattered knowledge. To enable auditable and delay-sensitive IoT services, these knowledge will be shared among decentralized intelligent network edges (DINEs), end users, and supervisors frequently. Blockchain has a promising ability to provide a traceable, privacy-preserving and tamper-resistant ledger for sharing edge knowledge. However, due to the complicated environments of network edges, knowledge sharing among DINEs still faces many challenges. Firstly, the resource limitation and mobility of DINEs impede the applicability of existing consensus tricks (e.g., Poof of Work, Proof of Stake, and Paxos) of blockchain. Secondly, the adversaries may eavesdrop the content of edge knowledge or entice the blockchain to forks using some attacking models (like man-in-the-middle attack, denial of services, etc.). In this article, an user-centric blockchain (UCB) framework is proposed for preserving edge knowledge sharing in IoT. Significant superiorities of UCB benefit from the proof of popularity (PoP) consensus mechanism, which is more energy-efficient and fast. Security analysis and experiments based on Raspberry Pi 3 Model B demonstrate its feasibility with low block generating delay and complexity.

Mahmud Hasan, Binil Starly

No abstract is available for this record.

Christof Ebert, Πάνος Λουρίδας, Tiago M. Fernández‐Caramés, Paula Fraga‐Lamas

Suppose that you are developing a critical application that handles sensitive data. Access to the data should be limited, and data should be changed only under specific circumstances. Moreover, at any point in time you may be asked to provide an audit trail for the entire history of any piece of data, for example, the entire history of changes for a specific record. How will you make sure that you can provide the history as it happened, certain that it has not been tampered with in any way?

Jiadi Liu, Songtao Guo, Yawei Shi, Liang Feng · 5 authors

Edge cache service (ECS), as a prospective edge network service paradigm, can significantly reduce the data transmission latency and improve the Quality of Service (QoS) of digital content providers by offloading content data to edge devices in the network. Compared to centralized content service, ECS can provide digital content from nearby edge devices via a high-speed wireless network with fewer hops. However, how to motivate edge devices to share their cache resource and ensure the reliability of content data under the diversity of device behavior remains a challenging issue. In this article, we aim to design an ECS framework for cache resource trading and digital content sharing in the edge network. By using blockchain-based credentials, we first provide the cache resource trading mechanism for the trading between the content provider and edge devices. Then, we give a double auction mechanism for digital content trading between edge devices. The experimental results show the proposed framework can greatly improve the matching efficiency of cache resources and reduce the data transmission overhead in edge networks.

Γεώργιος Σπαθούλας, Lydia Negka, Pankaj Pandey, Sokratis Katsikas

No abstract is available for this record.

William Villegas-Ch, Xavier Palacios-Pacheco, Milton Román Cañizares

Currently, universities, as centers of research and innovation, integrate in their processes various technologies that allow improving services and processes for their members. Among the innovative technologies are the Internet of Things that, through a variety of devices, allows obtaining data from the environment and people. This information is processed in cloud computing models and Big Data architectures that obtain knowledge through data analysis. These results lead to improving processes and making better decisions that improve the services available at the university. The integration of technologies allows for the generation of a sustainable environment that seeks the cohesion of the population with the environment, in such a way that economic growth is guaranteed in balance with the environment. However, all technology needs to guarantee the security of processes and data, and for this purpose, a new technology such as blockchain is integrated, which seeks to respond to two needs, the security and agility of processes. Integrating this technology in a university requires the analysis of the blockchain components to generate a new layer that adapts to the architecture of a university campus. This ensures that the data are kept cryptographically private to avoid exposure and that the entire process is verified by multiple blocks.

Parin Patel, Hiren Patel

No abstract is available for this record.