We propose a fully distributed system architecture and a scalable self-organized sharding scheme for the Internet-of-Things (IoT) blockchains that can guarantee system security without reducing its throughput. In the system, the IoT devices are supported by the set of blockchain peers that gather, process, verify, and store the blocks of IoT transaction records. To support communications among peers, the system is realized in the mobile-edge computing (MEC) network. We design a new consensus mechanism in which each peer votes on the outputs of each block task in its shard. The peer's voting power is computed from its reputation, i.e., trustworthiness in the system. By adopting a reputation-based coalitional game model, we formulate a novel self-organized shard formation algorithm in which each peer acts as a rational player aiming to maximize both its payoff and the coalitional reputation. We prove that the algorithm converges to the reputation-based stable shard structure, i.e., a structure that maximizes the payoff and coalitional reputation of each peer without negatively affecting other peers. The algorithm shows a superior performance in terms of system security and throughput when compared to state-of-the-art sharding schemes and reputation-based blockchains.
In the Internet of Vehicles (IoVs), vehicles generate and disseminate information, which makes the related vehicular services realized. However, the IoVs is an untrusted environment. Vehicles cannot evaluate the credibility of the received information, which makes it a challenge to implement data sharing in IoVs. Blockchain, constantly directed main attention, are considered as a feasible solution to address the challenge, due to its advantages of decentralization, unforgeability, and collective maintenance. The consensus mechanism of blockchain requires the miners in the system with strong computing power for mining, while the computing power of nodes in IoVs is limited, which restricts the application of blockchain in IoVs. In fact, the application of blockchain in IoVs can be implemented by employing edge computing. The key entity of edge computing is the edge servers(ESs). Roadside nodes (RSUs) can be deployed as ESs of edge computing in IoVs. In this article, we study the ESs deployment scheme for covering more vehicle nodes in IoVs, and propose a randomized algorithm to calculate approximation solutions. Finally, we simulated the performance of the proposed scheme and compared it with other deployment schemes.
Mobile edge computing (MEC) and next-generation mobile networks are set to disrupt the way intelligent and autonomous systems are interconnected. This will have an effect on a wide range of domains, from the Internet of Things to autonomous mobile robots. The integration of such a variety of MEC services in a inherently distributed architecture requires a robust system for managing hardware resources, balancing the network load and securing the distributed applications. Blockchain technology has emerged a solution for managing MEC services, with consensus protocols and data integrity checks that enable transparent and efficient distributed decision-making. In addition to transparency, the benefits from a security point of view are evident. Nonetheless, blockchain technology faces significant challenges in terms of scalability. In this chapter, we review existing consensus protocols and scalability techniques in both well-established and next-generation blockchain architectures. From this, we evaluate the most suitable solutions for managing MEC services and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the available alternatives.
Sergey Smetanin, Aleksandr Ometov, Mikhail Komarov, Pavel Mašek · 5 authors
The present increase of attention toward blockchain-based systems is currently reaching a tipping point with the corporate focus shifting from exploring the technology potential to creating Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)-based systems. In light of a significant number of already existing blockchain applications driven by the Internet of Things (IoT) evolution, the developers are still facing a lack of tools and instruments for appropriate and efficient performance evaluation and behavior observation of different blockchain architectures. This paper aims at providing a systematic review of current blockchain evaluation approaches and at identifying the corresponding utilization challenges and limitations. First, we outline the main metrics related to the blockchain evaluation. Second, we propose the blockchain modeling and analysis classification based on the critical literature review. Third, we extend the review with publicly accessible industrial tools. Next, we analyze the selected results for each of the proposed classes and outline the corresponding limitations. Finally, we identify current challenges of the blockchain analysis from the system evaluation perspective, as well as provide future perspectives.
Mobile edge computing (MEC), as a promising technology, provides proximate and prompt computing service for mobile users on various applications. With appropriate incentives, profit-driven users can offload multi-task requests across heterogeneous edge servers. However, such incentive trade lacks a trustworthy platform. Due to the decentralized nature of MEC, trading information from players is easily tampered with by edge servers, which poses a threat to cross-server resource allocation. In this paper, we jointly consider incentives and cross-server resource allocation in blockchain-driven MEC, where the blockchain prevents malicious edge servers from tampering with player information by maintaining a continuous tamper-proof ledger database. Particularly, we propose two double auction mechanisms, namely a double auction mechanism based on breakeven (DAMB) and a more efficient breakeven-free double auction mechanism (BFDA), in which users request multi-task service with claimed bids and edge servers cooperate with each other to serve users. A delegated proof of stake (DPoS) based blockchain technology is leveraged to realize decentralized, untampered, safe and fair resource allocation consensus mechanism. The simulation results show that the proposed DAMB and BFDA can significantly improve the system efficiency of MEC.
Shuming Seng, Changqing Luo, Xi Li, Heli Zhang · 5 authors
The popularity of mobile devices has driven the occurrence of ultra-dense wireless networks (UDNs) to accommodate high volumes of data therein generated by mobile users (MUs) running various mobile applications, such as virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR) and online gaming. Since many such mobile applications are computation-intensive, mobile edge computing (MEC), a promising computing paradigm that can provide on-demand computation resources (i.e., virtual machines (VMs)), is considered to adopt for allowing MUs to offload their computation tasks to EgSvrs in the proximity. Previous works have developed many schemes to schedule computation tasks to be offloaded to edge servers (EgSvrs). However, these developed schemes are centralized, which are vulnerable to congested coordination operations, and have no trustworthiness guarantee as well. In this paper, we propose to design a decentralized coordination scheme to orchestrate MUs and EgSvrs for scheduling computation tasks to their right VMs by taking advantage of blockchain technology. Specifically, we develop an efficient task-VM matching algorithm that jointly considers task execution time and energy consumption. Particularly, we prove the stability of the task-VM matching achieved by the developed matching algorithm. Besides, we further implement the developed task-VM matching algorithm on the blockchain by developing a smart matching contract to perform task-VM matching on the blockchain without trusted third parties. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that our decentralized coordination scheme can improve the performance significantly and converge to a stable state very quickly.
E-health systems have witnessed widespread usage in the last few years, mainly due to advancements in health monitoring hardware and the availability of remote diagnostic services. Given the numerous benefits, there are two main challenges: management of the e-health ecosystem and security and privacy of sensitive data. The former results from nonunified, redundant, and often replicated information across numerous independent e-health service providers. While the later stems from sensitive information stored in centralized systems that can be compromised. Blockchain has emerged as a promising technology, which can be used to secure access and privacy of data and provide an umbrella management solution to large-scale distributed and decentralized enterprise systems. In this article, we present a unified system for migrating independent conventional e-health systems to a single blockchain-based ecosystem. More specifically, we address the issues of difference in data structures for conventional relational databases and blockchain file databases. The solution describes the conversion process and synchronization of information in a unified system for large-scale e-health data. The implementation and analysis show that significant improvements in data storage, access control, and seamless migration can be achieved.
With the development of technology, the network structure has changed a lot. Many people regard the Internet of Things as the next-generation network structure, which means all the embedded devices can communicate with each other directly. However, some problems remain in IoT before it can be applied in a large scale. Blockchain, which has become a hot research topic in recent years, may be one of the solutions. However, currently, the transaction speed of blockchain is still a disadvantage compared to traditional transaction methods. This paper focuses on to implement a high-performance blockchain platform. After investigation of the current blockchain consensus algorithm and blockchain architecture, we propose: (1) an improved blockchain consensus algorithm, which is implemented based on the mortgage model instead of probability model; (2) a cross-chain protocol with transverse expansion capacity, which would support the message transmission among chains; (3) a high-performance cross-chain blockchain network structure, which could handle more than 1000 transactions per second per chain by verification. Experiments have been carried out, and shown that the cross-chain blockchain network structure we provided is feasible to meet the requirement of large-scale distributed IoT applications.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Abstract In the past few decades, Intelligent Transport System (ITS) has gained the popularity in smart society. Global automotive stakeholders such as Google, Uber, and Toshiba are the driving force in that and also looking for the interconnection of autonomous vehicles (AVs) for road traffic management, that is, connected AVs (CAV). CAVs are vulnerable to various safety and security issues, for instance, denial‐of‐service, global positioning system (GPS) spoofing, man‐in‐the‐middle, and timing attacks, which raise serious concerns for their development in application specific areas. Although many solutions exist in the literature, most of them are focused on centralized systems, which is having a single‐point‐failure. In light of the above facts, we analyze and classify the security and privacy issues in CAV and proposed a solution taxonomy in this article. We emphasized the defense mechanism for these attacks on the CAV system along with their enactment on issues and discovered how emergent blockchain technology could handle it. Furthermore, we proposed a blockchain‐based secure and decentralized CAV architecture to mitigate security and privacy issues such as denial of service, man‐in‐the‐middle, hijacking, GPS spoofing, and replay attacks. Finally, we reconnoiter the open research challenges associated with the blockchain‐based CAV system. To validate the efficacy of the proposed system, a real‐time case study on smart city integration over edge computing using computation and communication costs is proposed in this article.
With the recent considerable developments in the Internet of Things (IoT), billions of resource-constrained devices are interconnected through the internet. Monitoring this huge number of IoT devices that are heterogeneous in terms of underlying communication protocols and data format is challenging. The majority of existing IoT device monitoring solutions heavily rely on centralized architectures. Since using centralized architectures comes at the expense of trusting an authority, it has several inherent drawbacks, including vulnerability to security attacks, lack of data privacy, and unauthorized data manipulation. Hence, a new decentralized approach is crucial to remedy these drawbacks. One of the most promising technologies which is widely used to provide decentralization is blockchain. Additionally, to ease the burden of communication overhead and computational power on resource-constrained IoT devices, fog computing can be exploited to decrease communication latency and provide better network scalability. In this paper, we propose a scalable blockchain-based architecture for monitoring IoT devices using fog computing. To demonstrate the feasibility and usability of the proposed solution, we have implemented a proof-of-concept prototype, leveraging Ethereum smart contracts. Finally, a comprehensive evaluation is conducted. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed solution is significantly scalable and compatible with resource-constrained IoT devices.
With the recent considerable developments in the Internet of Things (IoT),\nbillions of resource-constrained devices are interconnected through the\ninternet. Monitoring this huge number of IoT devices that are heterogeneous in\nterms of underlying communication protocols and data format is challenging. The\nmajority of existing IoT device monitoring solutions heavily rely on\ncentralized architectures. Since using centralized architectures comes at the\nexpense of trusting an authority, it has several inherent drawbacks, including\nvulnerability to security attacks, lack of data privacy, and unauthorized data\nmanipulation. Hence, a new decentralized approach is crucial to remedy these\ndrawbacks. One of the most promising technologies which is widely used to\nprovide decentralization is blockchain. Additionally, to ease the burden of\ncommunication overhead and computational power on resource-constrained IoT\ndevices, fog computing can be exploited to decrease communication latency and\nprovide better network scalability.\n In this paper, we propose a scalable blockchain-based architecture for\nmonitoring IoT devices using fog computing. To demonstrate the feasibility and\nusability of the proposed solution, we have implemented a proof-of-concept\nprototype, leveraging Ethereum smart contracts. Finally, a comprehensive\nevaluation is conducted. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed\nsolution is significantly scalable and compatible with resource-constrained IoT\ndevices.\n
Zhenzhen Jiao, Baoxian Zhang, Li Zhang, Min Liu · 6 authors
Mobile ad-hoc cloud can exploit the computing resources (e.g., smartphones, vehicles, and unmanned systems) scattered in the mobile environment to form a self-organized ad-hoc local resource pool for providing opportunistic computing services. However, the highly dynamic and distributed characteristics of the mobile ad-hoc network environment bring great challenges in privacy and security in such opportunistic resource sharing. In this article, we first discuss the attractive features of blockchain for providing such resource sharing services in the mobile ad-hoc network environment in a secure and trustful way and then discuss the problems caused when using existing consensus protocols in such an environment. We accordingly devise a blockchain based trustful mobile ad-hoc cloud architecture, AdChain cloud. We describe the functions at different layers in this architecture, including the network layer, blockchain layer, and smart contract layer. To adapt to the high dynamics of the mobile ad-hoc network environment, we design a stability-aware consensus protocol at the blockchain layer. Simulation results show that our solution can achieve improved performance as compared with existing work.
Industry 4.0 technological expansion and the multiple accesses to the diverse Smart Grid domains (power networks, control systems, market, customer premises) entail the need to provide efficient interconnection mechanisms with connection from anywhere, at any time and in anyhow. However, this type of requirement should not only consist in imposing interoperability solutions between entities and domains, but also in searching the way to justify and trace connections (how, when, where, who) for future governance or auditing actions. This paper, therefore, presents a three layer-based interconnection architecture and several interconnection strategies, all of them adapting the traditional policy decision and enforcement approaches together with the blockchain technology to manage reliable and secure connections among entities, processes and critical resources. With this architecture in mind, the paper also analyzes the coupling level of the blockchain technology, and explores which interconnection strategy is more suitable for Smart Grid domains and their control systems.
A vaccine is a biological product which is an important means for human beings to protect themselves. Most of its users are young children with weak immunity. Once a vaccine has a problem, it will pose a serious threat to the lives of many people. At present, the supervision of vaccine production is very simple. The vaccine production record is completely controlled by the enterprises. Enterprises only submit production records to the supervisory agency for review when the vaccine needs to be sold. Production records are easily forged and modified. In order to solve the shortcomings of traditional centralized management. We propose a supervision method for vaccine production based on double-level blockchain. At first, we have designed a double-level blockchain structure. The first level is private data of vaccine prduction enterprise, including production records and corresponding hash. The next level is public data, including production records hash and vaccine information. In this way, we make vaccine enterprise to submit production records in a timely manner without fear of privacy leaks. We avoid enterprise tampering or falsification of production records through the non-tampering features and time stamps of the blockchain. To improve the time efficiency, we propose a consensus mechanism for multi-node cooperate. The primary supervisory node provides sorting services and verifies the correctness of the blockchain replica. The ordinary supervisory node can replace the primary supervisory node when necessary, and help the primary supervisory node recovers data in case of information loss. The review node is responsible for providing complete and correct blockchain copies for other nodes. So we can avoids the problem of waste of time resources in the traditional blockchain system. In addition, in order to avoid the waste of space caused by the redundancy of the blockchain, we propose a vaccine data cutting mechanism. We use the timestamp of the blockchain and the vaccine validity period to determine if the block can be cutted. At the same time, it is also possible to judge whether the block can be cutted based on the information exchange with the vaccination institution. Through these methods, we have realized spatiotemporal efficiency supervision of vaccine production. And for the time being, research work in the field of vaccine production supervision is still very rare. So Our work is ground-breaking.
In the emerging world of IoT applications, machines are going to be at the endpoints of the Internet engaging in complex Machine to Machine (M2M) communications. Be it a personal assistant (softbot)making an appointment with a doctor or an autonomous car filling fuel or charging at a refueling station, in the future, it is going to be M2M communications without human intervention. In such a scenario, robust and secure technology is essential to record every M2M transactions. This paper makes use of blockchain, a distributed ledger technology for intelligent transportation systems. It is proposed that blockchain networks such as Ethereum have the foundations to record and satisfy the transaction that has happened between the machines. A permissioned Ethereum blockchain the smart contract is used for recording each every transaction that come off between the car and electric station. An algorithm is proposed to recharge the autonomous electric vehicles as a case study.
Fog computing, a novel computing paradigm, migrates cloud computing to the edge of network and consequently decrease the overhead of process and movement of the large-scale big data. Fog computing is promising to lower communication delay and offload network traffic with the scale of big data increasing in large-scale IoT application, which brings micro-data centers to the network edge, enabling the network edge to perceive, process, storage and calculate the massive data, reducing the amount of transferred data. However, numerous fog nodes at the network edge face an external attack resulting in serious security threats arising from the trusting relationship vulnerability because of the lack of the consideration of the properties of the fog computing system. This paper addresses the design for developing secure distributed data management platform for fog computing in large-scale IoT application, along with a blockchain-based data management implementation of the platform, which approaches the major challenges: how to realize the integration of data security and storage management for fog computing in large-scale IoT application and enrich rational interoperability for interconnected things. Experimental results show that the system works well to empower data provenance and transparency and defend against unauthorized access effectively in fog computing, scales well with loss of the performance of communication and computing maintaining in acceptable range, verifying the efficiency and feasibility of our design to provide privacy, integrity and fine-grained data management for fog computing in large-scale IoT application by introducing the data management platform based upon the blockchain network and smart contracts therein.
The advent of 5G has sparked interest in Wi-Fi offloading techniques that enable efficient resource sharing and congestion management of wireless communication spectrum. However, offloading data between multiple networks (i.e. service providers) requires costly inter-provider communication which has a substantial overhead as well as high offloading latency. Moreover, involvement of the profit-oriented decision making of service providers has an inherent weakness of unfair scheduling among users and networks. To overcome those problems, this research work proposes a holistic framework similar to an online data market place where existing infrastructure can be used to set up Wi-Fi zones that everyone can use from their own data plan irrespective of the network operators they belong to. First, our proposed architecture improves the efficacy of offloading by using decentralized nature of the emerging Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to set up an operator-assisted data offloading platform, resulting in efficient inter-provider communication. Second, our proposal strengthens the fair scheduling of offloading resources by using blockchain technology to initiate unbiased and independent decision making. The resulting service is a rating system for the sellers to make reliable transactions for payments.
As the key platform to deal with big data, Hadoop cannot fully protect data security of users by relying on a single Kerberos authentication mechanism. In addition, the single Namenode has disadvantages such as single point failure, performance bottleneck and poor scalability. To solve these problems, a big data security protection scheme is proposed. In this scheme, blockchain technology is adopted to deploy distributed Namenode server cluster to take joint efforts to safeguard the metadata and to allocate access tasks of users. We also improved the heartbeat model to collect user behavior so as to make a faster response to Datanode failure. The smart contract conducts reasonable allocation of user role through the judgment of user tag and risk value. It also establishes a tracking chain of risk value to monitor user behavior in real time. Experiments show that this scheme can better protect data security in Hadoop. It has the advantage of metadata decentralization and the data is hard to be tampered.
In legacy blockchain based systems, each involved node has to store a complete blockchain to ensure the system security without any central authoritative controller. However, it is usually impossible for a wireless IoT node to store a complete blockchain, especially for those simple sensor nodes without sufficient storage and computing resources. In this paper, we propose a block assignment scheme for blockchain based wireless IoT systems with aim to tackle the blockchain storage problem. Specifically, we propose to maintain a complete blockchain by a set of IoT nodes in a collaborative way on the premise of ensuring that each node can check every transaction. On the other hand, we should save the storage space of IoT nodes to the greatest extent for saving more blocks so as to maximize the lifetime of IoT nodes. We formulate this optimal block assignment problem as a 0-1 mixed integer-programming problem. We propose to incorporate Chaotic optimized algorithm into Genetic algorithm to provide an efficient near-optimal solution. Compared with the brute-force and conventional Genetic algorithms, our proposed algorithm can achieve the minimum storage occupancy to store blocks. Meanwhile, the proposed algorithm has the lowest computational complexity.
Recently, software-defined Industrial Internet of Things (SDIIoT), the integration of software-defined networking (SDN) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), has emerged. It is perceived as an effective way to manage IIoT dynamically. Aiming to improve scalability and flexibility of SDIIoT, multi-SDN has been applied to form a physically distributed control plane to handle the large amount of data generated by industrial devices. However, as the core of multi-SDN, reaching consensus among multiple SDN controllers is a thorny issue. To meet the required design principle, this paper proposes a blockchain-enabled distributed architecture with SDIIoT to synchronize local views between distinct SDN controllers and finally reach the consensus of global view. On the other hand, both the cryptographic operations of blockchain and the noncryptographic computational tasks have access to the same computational resource pool of mobile edge cloud (MEC). In order to simultaneously optimize the throughput of blockchain and the energy consumption caused by computing, we adaptively allocate computational resources and the block size by jointly considering the trust features of SDN controllers and the resource requirements of non-cryptographic operations. To implement the truly distributed manner of blockchain, we describe our problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and propose a novel deep recurrent Q-network (DRQN) approach to solve it. In the simulation results, we compare two different protocols of blockchain and show the effectiveness of our scheme in either of them.
In this study, we propose a privacy preservation and efficient distributed searching and matching of Electric Vehicles (EVs) charging demander with suppliers based on reputation. Partially homomorphic encryption-based on reputation computation using local communication is used in the implementation, while hiding EVs users' location. A private blockchain is incorporated in the system to verify and permit secure trading of energy among the EVs' demander and suppliers. The results of the simulation show that the proposed privacy preserved algorithm converges more faster as compared to Bichromatic Mutual Nearest Neighbor (BMNN) algorithm.
The articles in this special issue have solicited high-quality manuscripts that describe in-depth the breadth of real-world blockchain-based multi-disciplinary IIoT deployments and present actual experiences in resolving contextual blockchain-related challenges. In addition, these articles develop and share best practices, vision realizations and lessons learned in this integrated environment and establish guiding principles for technical, operational and business successes.