The introduction of edge computing (EC) in intelligent driving allows the vehicle to offload tasks to the EC server closer to the vehicle side, creating a new paradigm for task offloading and resource allocation. The movement of the vehicle, the time sensitivity of the processing data, and the resource allocation of the EC server have become bottlenecks of the rapid development of intelligent driving. In this article, we jointly considered the problems of the network economy and resource allocation. In order to eliminate dependence on third parties, we propose a resource transaction architecture based on the blockchain. Moreover, we propose the dynamic allocation algorithm of edge resources (DAERs) based on the double auction mechanism to maximize the satisfaction of users and service providers of edge computing (SPs), where the DAER algorithm is implemented in the form of smart contracts in the blockchain architecture. In particular, we propose the state search algorithm that can improve the prediction accuracy of the staged destination of the vehicle to help allocate resources reasonably. Through simulation experiments, we verify the superior performance of the DAER algorithm in terms of resource utilization rate and the satisfaction of both parties participating in the auction.
While Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the most widely used consensus mechanism for blockchain, it received harsh criticism due to its massive waste of energy for meaningless hash calculation. Some studies have introduced Proof-of-Stake to address this issue. However, such protocols widen the gap between rich and poor and in the worst case lead to an oligopoly, where the rich control the entire network. Other studies have attempted to translate the energy consumption of PoW into useful work, but they have many limitations, such as narrow application scope, serious security issues and impractical incentive model. In this paper, we introduce AxeChain, which can use the computing power of blockchain to solve practical problems raised by users without greatly compromising decentralization or security. AxeChain achieves this by coupling hard problem solving with PoW mining. We model the security of AxeChain and derive a balance curve between power utilization and system security. That is, under the reasonable assumption that the attack power does not exceed 1/3 of the total power, 1/2 of total power can be safely used to solve practical problems. We also design a novel incentive model based on the amount of work involved in problem solving, balancing the interests of both the users and miners. Moreover, our experimental results show that AxeChain provides strong security guarantees, no matter what kind of problem is submitted.
Jie Feng, F. Richard Yu, Qingqi Pei, Jianbo Du · 5 authors
The application of blockchain to mobile edge computing (MEC) systems has attracted great interests. However, the design and optimization of blockchain and MEC in most existing works are done separately, which will result in sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we propose a joint optimization framework for blockchain-enabled MEC systems to achieve the optimal trade-off between the performance of the MEC system and the performance of the blockchain system. Specifically, both MEC and blockchain are considered as services in the framework, where energy consumption and delay/time to finality (DTF) are the performance metrics for the MEC system and the blockchain system, respectively. We formulate an optimization problem to achieve the optimal trade-off through jointly optimizing user association, data rate allocation, block producer scheduling, and computational resource allocation. To solve the problem, we decouple the optimization variables for efficient algorithm design. In addition, we develop an iterative algorithm for user association and data rate allocation and a bisection algorithm for computing resource allocation. Simulation results show the convergence of the proposed algorithms, and the proposed scheme can achieve the optimal trade-off between energy consumption and DTF.
M.E in Computer Engineering from SVBIT, GTU, Gandhinagar, India., Pratik Patel, Pinkal Chauhan, M.E in Computer Engineering from LDRP, Gandhinagar, India.
In our everyday lives, IoT plays a vital role. It is crucial to sense, capture and share data from connected devices via internet. Existing system proposed centralized client/server approach where central authority keeps a record of all the activities. Failure of such centralized authority makes the whole system fail. A decentralized / distributed approach is therefore needed if a single failure point is avoided. In this paper contains information to integrating Blockchain in IoT ecosystem in order to achieve access control. We proposed smart contract based architecture which consist multiple permission contract, one decision contract and one entry contract, to achieve distributed and secure IoT device access control. To conclude system framework, we provide a case study in an IoT system with two laptops and one Raspberry Pi single-board computers, where the PCs, DC and EC are implemented based on the Ethereum smart contract platform to achieve the access control.
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is an emerging technology to remove middlemen from an eco-system. However, many DLT/BC projects are very technologically oriented and fail to address the business case and the re-design of its eco-system. Therefore, many DLT/BC projects do fail. We propose a minimalistic decision tree to check whether a business case is suitable for implementation by DLT/BC technology and evaluate the tree in the healhtcare domain.
Hanumantharaju R, K. N. Shreenath, K. G. Srinivasa, Swetha Namburu
Mobile edge computing is a recent trend to complement the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem in the computing sector. IoT is the internet connected communications related to physical devices and everyday objects. The emergence of intelligent living spaces has been due to the rapid development of IoT technologies. Blockchain is one such technology that expands the list of information also referred to like records that are saved as blocks in the Blockchain which are connected using cryptographic algorithms. Within a Blockchain IoT environment, when data or device authentication information is stored in a Blockchain, authentication information can be displayed when verifying Block chain’s transactions, which are also referred to as proof of work. A principle of Zero-knowledge proof (ZKF) is implemented in this paper which is a way of proving that knowledge is known without exposing any data to the user. The proposed model uses a Mobile application where users can prove without revealing users' passwords. Blockchain stores client information that can prevent data from being manipulated. The results of applying the ZKF theory for data security are shown through a web application and NFC.
Anti-forgery information, transaction verification, and smart contract are functionalities of blockchain technology that can change the traditional business processes of IT applications. These functionalities increase the data transparency, and trust of users in the new application models, thus resolving many different social problems today. In this work, we take all the advantages of this technology to build a blockchain-based authentication system (called the Vietnamese Educational Certification blockchain, which stands for VECefblock) to deal with the delimitation of fake certificate issues in Vietnam. In this direction, firstly, we categorize and analyze blockchain research and application trends to make out our contributions in this domain. Our motivating factor is to curb fake certificates in Vietnam by applying the suitability of blockchain technology to the problem domain. This study proposed some blockchain-based application development principles in order to build a step by step VECefblock with the following procedures: designing overall architecture along with business processes, data mapping structure and implementing the decentralized application that can meet the specific Vietnamese requirements. To test system functionalities, we used Hyperledger Fabric as a blockchain platform that is deployed on the Amazon EC2 cloud. Through performance evaluations, we proved the operability of VECefblock in the practical deployment environment. This experiment also shows the feasibility of our proposal, thus promoting the application of blockchain technology to deal with social problems in general as well as certificate management in Vietnam.
D.M. Sheeba, S. Jayalakshmi, Dept of Computer Applications, VISTAS, Chennai, India.
Internet of Things (IoT) growing at a rate of exponential numbers in recent years has received extensive attention with BlockChain (BC) technology which provide trust to IoT with its immutable nature, decentralization in computing, resource constraints, security and privacy. The distributed ledger of transactions in BC is path leading technology for addressing Cyber Threats in the form of data theft; it provides secure application architecture which has proven track of record for securing data. IoT devices using BC enabled to communicate between objects, share data, decide based on business criteria and act as a medium to securely transmit information. This work provides lightweight BlockChain with two prominent consensus mechanism PoW – Proof of Work and PoS – Proof of Stake for smart IoT devices. Next, Smart Home Device (SMD) is ensures providing best-in-class Security and Privacy for smart home Appliances. Further provides future advances in the Approach.
Hao Xu, Paulo Valente Klaine, Oluwakayode Onireti, Bin Cao · 6 authors
The sixth-generation (6G) network must provide better performance than previous generations to meet the requirements of emerging services and applications, such as multi-gigabit transmission rate, higher reliability, and sub-1 ms latency and ubiquitous connection for the Internet of Everything (IoE). However, with the scarcity of spectrum resources, efficient resource management and sharing are crucial to achieving all these ambitious requirements. One possible technology to achieve all this is the blockchain. Because of its inherent properties, the blockchain has recently gained an important position, which is of great significance to the 6G network and other networks. In particular, the integration of the blockchain in 6G will enable the network to monitor and manage resource utilization and sharing efficiently. Hence, in this paper, we discuss the potentials of the blockchain for resource management and sharing in 6G using multiple application scenarios, namely, Internet of things, device-to-device communications, network slicing, and inter-domain blockchain ecosystems.
Electronic medical records (EMRs) are extremely important for patients’ treatment, doctors’ diagnoses, and medical technology development. In recent years, the distributed healthcare blockchain system has been researched for solving the information isolated island problem in centralized healthcare service systems. However, there still exists a series of important problems such as the patients’ sensitive information security, cross-institutional data sharing, medical quality, and efficiency. In this paper, we establish a lightweight privacy-preserving mechanism for a healthcare blockchain system. First, we apply an interleaving encoder to encrypt the original EMRs. This can hide the sensitive information of EMRs to protect the patient’s privacy security. Second, a ( t , n )-threshold lightweight message sharing scheme is presented. The EMRs are mapped to n different short shares, and it can be reconstructed by at least t shares. The EMR shares rather than the original EMRs are stored in the blockchain nodes. This can guarantee high security for EMR sharing and improve the data reconstruction efficiency. Third, the indexes of the stored EMR shares are employed to generate blocks that are chained together and finally form a blockchain. The authorized data users or institutions can recover an EMR by requesting at least t shares of the EMR from the blockchain nodes. In this way, the healthcare blockchain system can not only facilitate the cross-institution sharing process, but also provide proper protections for the EMRs. The security proof and analysis indicate that the proposed scheme can protect the privacy and security of patients’ medical information. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme is more efficient than similar literature in terms of energy consumption and storage space, and the healthcare blockchain system is more stable with the proposed message sharing scheme.
Sina Rafati Niya, Fabio Maddaloni, Thomas Bocek, Burkhard Stiller
Blockchains (BCs) are back-linked chain of records termed as blocks. To establish decentralized trusted systems, BCs employ consensus mechanisms. During the past ten years, there have been various proposals of BC design and implementations. However, most of the developed sate of the art BCs suffer from scalability issues. In order to enhance the scalability of the BCs, this paper proposes a transaction aggregation mechanism on a Proof-of-Stake (PoS)-based BC. Having developed the transaction aggregation and double linked blocks, efficient prevention and control of the BC's size growth is observed in the evaluated scenarios.
Areej Alsaafin, Ilham Qasse, Manar Abu Talib, Qassim Nasir
Nowadays, smart cities deploy several smart computing technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and interconnected network architecture for the purpose of providing innovative solutions and better collaboration between residents and local governments while maintaining an optimal utilization of the available resources. However, these technologies suffer from some security and privacy issues which are very critical for many applications. Blockchain technology is a valuable infrastructure solution that addresses these issues. The decentralized approach of the blockchain technology facilitates building a resilient ecosystem where IoT devices can function effectively and securely. Moreover, the architecture of the blockchain provides reliable communication by eliminating single point of failure and enabling users to maintain anonymity by employing privacy-preserving cryptographic algorithms. However, employing the blockchain technology in an IoT-based system is challenging due to the centralized nature of IoT-based systems and the resource constraints of its interconnected devices, which lead to several serious security and privacy issues. In this paper, we propose a blockchain infrastructure design that provides security and privacy to IoT-based systems of critical governmental and industrial applications. The proposed design includes a blockchain connected gateway, which adaptively and securely maintains user privacy preferences. Moreover, it handles the blockchain computation instead of overwhelming the IoT devices with heavy computation.
There are several instances when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the USA warns us of some outbreak in some specific or multiple food products. With such warnings, a lot of food gets wasted. However, with proper labeling and trackback system, only the food that is affected could be identified. By doing that, destroying only that food could save a lot of wastage of food. Blockchain is a technique that can trackback, from which farm the bad food is coming, could be identified very easily. The main motive of this research paper is to implement blockchain technology for the food network industry to allow a more secure, universal tracking scheme for shipments and transactions. By comparing this method to current food supply chain management systems, it is concluded that our proposed technique is much efficient and secure in solving the currently existing problems in the food supply chain industry.
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies and applications have flourished in blockchain research community. Massive data generated from diverse blockchain systems bring not only huge business values but also technological challenges in data analytics of heterogeneous blockchain data. Different from Bitcoin and Ethereum, EOSIO has richer diversity and a higher volume of blockchain data due to its unique architectural design in resource management, consensus scheme and high throughput. Despite its popularity (e.g., 89,800,000 blocks generated till November 14, 2019 since its launch on June 8, 2018), few studies have been made on data analysis of EOSIO. To fill this gap, we collect and process the up-to-date on-chain data from EOSIO. We name these well-processed EOSIO datasets as XBlock-EOS, which consists of 7 well-processed datasets: 1) Block, Transaction and Action, 2) Internal and External EOS Transfer Action, 3) Contract Information, 4) Contract Invocation, 5) Token Action, 6) Account Creation, 7) Resource Management. It is challenging to process and analyze a high volume of raw EOSIO data and establish the mapping from original raw data to the well-grained datasets since it requires substantial efforts in extracting various types of data as well as sophisticated knowledge on software engineering and data analytics. Meanwhile, we present statistics and exploration on these datasets. Moreover, we also outline the possible research opportunities based on XBlock-EOS.
Fog computing (FC) is used to reduce the energy consumption and latency for the heterogeneous communication approaches in the smart cities’ applications of the Internet of Everything (IoE). Fog computing nodes are connected through wired or wireless medium. The goal of smart city applications is to develop the transaction relationship of real-time response applications. There are various frameworks in real-world to support the IoE in smart-cities but they face the issues like security, platform Independence, multi-application assistance, and resource management. This article is motivated from the Blockchain and Fog computing technologies and presents a secured architecture Blockchain and Fog-based Architecture Network (BFAN) for IoE applications in the smart cities. The proposed architecture secures sensitive data with encryption, authentication, and Blockchain. It assists the System-developers and Architects to deploy the applications in smart city paradigm. The goal of the proposed architecture is to reduce the latency and energy, and ensure improved security features through Blockchain technology. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed architecture performs better than the existing frameworks for smart-cities.
Background/Objectives: Tremendous growth of information and communication technologies (ICTs) have positively affected the field of E-Learning (EL). However, recently the education mode is shifted from the traditional classroom towards EL due to widespread COVID-19. The selection of suitable EL tool and security of EL data and environment are still the key challenges that need to be addressed. The objective of this paper is to guide the EL Practitioners in the selection of suitable EL tool and to provide a detailed framework for maintaining privacy and security of EL data and environment. Purpose: This study aims to help EL practitioners in the selection of suitable EL tool and to provide a secure framework for the security of EL data and environment. Method: Realtime statistics are gathered and analyzed to visualize the impact of COVID-19 on education around the world. The increasing demand for EL during COVID-19 is analyzed, and a detailed taxonomy is provided to make the EL practitioners aware of existing distance learning solutions. A comparison of commonly used EL tools is provided that will help in the selection of EL tools according to institutional requirements. A Blockchain-based EL framework is proposed that will help EL designer in managing the security of EL data and environment. Conclusion: The proposed framework is expected to provide a promising solution for developing a fair and open learning online education environment and will overcome the deficiencies caused by school closures during COVID-19. Keywords: COVID-19; Blockchain; Security; Privacy; E-Learning; Digital Curriculum
The world-changing blockchain technique provides a novel method to establish a secure, trusted and decentralized system for solving the security and personal privacy problems in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. The mining process in blockchain requires miners to solve a proof-of-work puzzle, which requires high computational power. However, the lightweight IIoT devices cannot directly participate in the mining process due to the limitation of power and computational resources. The edge computing service makes it possible for IIoT applications to build a blockchain network, in which IIoT devices purchase computational resources from edge servers and thus can offload their computational tasks. The amount of computational resource purchased by IIoT devices depends on how many profits they can get in the mining process, and will directly affect the security of the blockchain network. In this paper, we investigate the incentive mechanism for the blockchain platform to attract IIoT devices to purchase more computational power from edge servers to participate in the mining process, thereby building a more secure blockchain network. We model the interaction between the blockchain platform and IIoT devices as a two-stage Stackelberg game, where the blockchain platform act as the leader, and IIoT devices act as followers. We analyze the existence and uniqueness of the Stackelberg equilibrium, and propose an efficient algorithm to compute the Stackelberg equilibrium point. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of our algorithm through extensive simulations, and analyze the strategies of blockchain platform and IIoT devices under different situations.
Abstract Objective: In order to cope with a sudden outbreak of new coronavirus infection, a large number of potential infected persons need to be isolated. A new smart monitoring system which integrates Internet of things and blockchain technology to monitor isolated people in real time was design and studied.Methods: A internet of things devices will collects the location and physical data of isolated people, the data will be sent to master devices which will integrate and format those data and transfer to a smart contract. A smart contract compares and analyses the data with the threshold which is predefined. When the data exceed the threshold, the smart contract will alert the master device, which will notify the isolated person and center for disease control and prevention, the event will be stored in the consortium blockchain. The blockchain does not store the isolated people's details, which are stored in electronic health records linked to the blockchain to guarantee the data safety.Results: This system realizes the effective real-time monitoring of isolators including their physical condition and geographical position on the premise of protecting their privacy and security.Conclusion: By the system, the center for disease control and prevention can respond quickly according to their alerts. It has the advantages of good integrity, tamper-proof, and transparency to isolators.
Tianrui Chen, Amjad Saeed Khan, Gan Zheng, Sangarapillai Lambotharan
This letter presents a secure user offloading mechanism in heterogeneous wireless networks (HWNs), where a macrocell base station (MBS) offloads its users to small cell access points (SCAs) using Vickrey auction. Additionally, a user-in-the-loop (UIL) strategy is exploited to encourage the unserved users to move to desired locations for connections. As the participants in the conventional auction-based trading may collude or take selfish actions, we employ Ethereum framework for trustless, secure and distributed auctioning. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed user offloading methodology. The security aspects of the blockchain framework are also discussed.