Yustus Eko Oktian, Thi-Thu-Huong Le, Uk Jo, Howon Kim
With the limited Internet bandwidth in a given area, unlimited data plans can create congestion because there is no retribution for transmitting many packets. The real-time pricing mechanism can inform users of their Internet consumption to limit congestion during peak hours. However, implementing real-time pricing is opex-heavy from the network provider side and requires high-integrity operations to gain consumer trust. This paper aims to leverage the software-defined network to solve the opex issues and blockchain technology to solve trust issues. First, the network congestion level in a given area is analyzed. Then, the price is adjusted accordingly. Devices that send a lot of traffic during congestion will be charged more expensive bills than if transmitting traffic during an off-peak period. To prevent over-charging, the consumers can pre-configure a customized Internet profile stating how many data bytes they are willing to send during congestion. The software-defined controller also authenticates consumers and checks whether they have enough token deposits in the blockchain as Internet usage fees. We implement our work using Ethereum and POX controllers. The experiment results show that the proposed real-time pricing can be performed seamlessly, and the network provider can reap up to 72.91% more profits than existing approaches, such as usage-based pricing or time-dependent pricing. The fairness and trustability of real-time pricing is also guaranteed through the proof-of-usage mechanism and the transparency of the blockchain.
Aaliya Sarfaraz, Ripon K. Chakrabortty, Daryl Essam
Supply chains have evolved into vast ecosystems and have grown more dynamic in recent decades, yet they still lack flexibility and scalability. Supply chain management (SCM) applications benefit greatly from the capabilities of blockchain technology (BCT), which enables the creation of a distributed ecosystem. Since the need for blockchain rises, so does the desire for chains that are scalable, flexible, efficient, and economical. Sharding technology has recently been developed to address the issues associated with blockchains. In this work, we propose a blockchain architecture, a scalable and efficient supply chain framework that keeps all information locally, to allow businesses absolute control over data. We are proposing a sharded design, which divides the ledger into multiple chains to enable scalability for processing transaction load. A qualitative analysis has been performed to prove that a scalable network can maintain maximum throughput in a dynamic environment.
Matthieu Amet, M Darshan, Gautam Srivastava, Jorge Crichigno
Blockchains have become quintessential for cutting-edge technology demands in the world. This trend will only continue to increase in the future. Looking at all modern technologies that seem to move towards decentralized architecture, blockchain and distributed ledger technology fit perfectly. In times of conventional database-orientated systems, modern frameworks made huge developments when application programming interfaces (APIs) and data were used cross-platform between centralized entities. A natural evolution for blockchain technology would be to enable communication and data exchange between blockchains (ie. both private and public). This could help not only digitize but could also set in a revolution for digital record-keeping that can be used for automation in the future. Our research work enables and tests interoperability between blockchains in different real-world scenarios. The research work also tries to understand various elements of a smart city environment and a few use-cases are discussed and experimented on.
Soosan Naderi Mighan, Jelena Mišić, Vojislav B. Mišić
We provide a comprehensive analytical model for block distribution in the Ethereum distribution network. We begin with a model for node connectivity based on reported measurements' and model the distribution of blocks using a Jackson network together with a priority M/G/1 queuing system. Our results show that the probability distribution of block response time is close to exponential distribution, while block delivery time exhibits a hypo-exponential distribution. Both distributions exhibit a thicker tail than the exponential distribution due to the peculiarities of the gossip-like protocol used to propagate blocks and transactions in Ethereum.
Dec 1, 2022·2022 IEEE Intl Conf on Parallel & Distributed Processing with Applications, Big Data & Cloud Computing, Sustainable Computing & Communications, Social Computing & Networking (ISPA/BDCloud/SocialCom/SustainCom)
Can Jiang, Duan-Yang Liu, Xiaoli Zhang, Kun Zhou · 5 authors
In recent years, the Bitcoin blockchain has gained wide attention due to its decentralization and transparency. With the extensive adoptions of the Bitcoin blockchain, its size has reached to 408 GB so far and is still growing, which significantly degrades its scalability. Besides, the bootstrap process for newly joining nodes is quite slow and costly due to the huge communication and computation overhead. In the paper, we devise a full-fledged solution that not only improves the scalability of the Bitcoin blockchain, but also accelerates the state synchronization of the Bitcoin blockchain. We adopt IPFS (Inter Planetary File System), a trusted off-chain storage platform, to amortize the storage pressure of the Bitcoin full nodes. Moreover, we present snapshot blocks to enable secure and fast synchronization of UTXO (Unspent Transaction Outputs) set instead of scanning again from the beginning of the Bitcoin blockchain. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments. The results show that, compared with the official Bitcoin core, the scheme reduces the storage space for Bitcoin full nodes by 97.8% and the synchronization time of new nodes by 81.5%, without breaking the protocols of existing system.
As a distributed ledger technology, the addition of new members in permissioned blockchain is usually composed of several steps among distributed nodes. The addition can not be considered successful until all of the steps are completed. In other words, these steps are an atomic operation. However, there is no solution for the atomic operation in existing permissioned blockchain, leading to an inconsistent state when the addition of new members is partially completed. To implement the atomic member addition in permissioned blockchain, we propose a method targeting at the atomic addition of new members based on distributed and autonomous rollback. After member addition starts, distributed nodes of existing members detect the new node and decide whether to rollback or not, instead of getting commands from the coordinator. After deciding to rollback, a new configuration block is added to achieve rollback of the uncompleted member addition. In order for the new configuration block to pass the policy validation of orderers, we set a rollback mode for orderers. The evaluation results show that our method can actually implement atomic member addition and has little impact on performance.
With the promotion of shared energy storage (SES) business model, the evaluation indices of SES market can help the market entities understand the market states to adjust their market strategies in time. Considering that some basic data will be owned by the market entities, the computation of evaluation indices may require shared data from multiple parties. However, for the sake of privacy, the market entities may be reluctant to share their data. To address the above issues, a novel computation scheme of evaluation indices of SES market in the renewable energy accommodation scenario is proposed based on smart contracts with the key advantages of decentralization and data privacy protection. Firstly, a power blockchain-based information disclosure framework of SES market is presented to confirm the data ownership of the market entities. Moreover, a decentralized computation scheme combined with smart contracts and fully homomorphic encryption is proposed to compute the evaluation indices of SES market without exposing the original values of the shared data, preserving the privacy of data sharers, i.e., the market entities of SES market. Finally, case studies on the actual data from an SES trading pilot project in Qinghai, China, are performed to verify the effectiveness and performance of the proposed scheme based on a Hyperledger Fabric-based simulation system of power blockchain. The results show that the evaluation indices of SES market can be accurately computed on the power blockchain without privacy exposure risks.
Dec 1, 2022·2022 IEEE Intl Conf on Parallel & Distributed Processing with Applications, Big Data & Cloud Computing, Sustainable Computing & Communications, Social Computing & Networking (ISPA/BDCloud/SocialCom/SustainCom)
The information cache technology in the Named Data Network (NDN) decouples the location of the Content Provider (CP) from the data, which leads to the data in the storage nodes facing security threats due to the lack of security control. Therefore, access control becomes extremely important. Because Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) supports sending data to a group of unknown recipients and realizes flexible and fine-grained access control, CP-ABE is often used in the access control of NDN. However, there are two problems when CP-ABE is directly applied to NDN: first, CP is required to be online all the time to verify the legitimacy of users and distribute decryption keys; Second, illegal users can obtain ciphertext. In view of the above problems, we propose an access control scheme based on Non-Fungible Token(NFT). Smart contracts distribute AttributeNFT and AccessNFT for users, and provide credentials for users to obtain keys and ciphertext. NDN routers only forward ciphertext data packets to valid users by implementing the filtering mechanism based on AccessNFT, and finally achieve the purpose of protecting data and achieving the safe distribution of data. Finally, we implement the system prototype on the Hyperledger Fabric and analyze the performance of the smart contract with the caliper. The experimental results show that the access delay of the smart contract is low and can meet the requirements of access control.
Valerio Mandarino, Giuseppe Pappalardo, Emiliano Tramontana
Ethereum network has introduced an important innovation to blockchain technology that has deeply changed the world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies: Turing-complete smart contracts. Thanks to smart contracts it is possible to mint fungible and non-fungible tokens, manage decentralized organizations and offer services such as digital identity, advertisement, time commitments, decentralized exchanges, etc. However, smart contract development is not free from challenges. This paper analyses a set of design patterns that have been documented and groups them according to related smart contracts' weaknesses. Moreover, two novel solutions are presented in the form of design patterns. The first is a micro architecture that deals with a treasure reserve and aims at reducing gas consumption when having to update the code of a smart contract. The second presents a solution for packing bits each representing a Boolean value.
Blockchain has been deemed as a promising solution for providing security and privacy protection in the next-generation wireless networks. Large-scale concurrent access for massive wireless devices to accomplish the consensus procedure may consume prohibitive communication and computing resources, and thus may limit the application of blockchain in wireless conditions. As most existing consensus protocols are designed for wired networks, directly apply them for wireless users equipment (UEs) may exhaust their scarce spectrum and computing resources. In this paper, we propose AirCon, a byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocol for wireless UEs via the over-the-air computation. The novelty of AirCon is to take advantage of the intrinsic characteristic of the wireless channel and automatically achieve the consensus in the physical layer while receiving from the UEs, which greatly reduces the communication and computational cost that would be caused by traditional consensus protocols. We implement the AirCon protocol integrated into an LTE system and provide solutions to the critical issues for over-the-air consensus implementation. Experimental results are provided to show the feasibility of the proposed protocol, and simulation results to show the performance of the AirCon protocol under different wireless conditions.
Hafiz Abid Mahmood Malik, Asghar Ali Shah, AbdulHafeez Muhammad, Ahmad Kananah · 5 authors
The Internet of Things is a system of interconnected smart devices that can communicate with each other and with other devices over the Internet, with or without human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. Although IoT devices, which have IPs, make living easier, they are also a threat to the security and privacy of people. This research work presents a solution to the problem of security in the network of IoT, based on the idea of implementing the blockchain in IoT. Blockchain is a decentralized technology that adds blocks at the end of the chain. It saves the hash value for every block, and corresponds to the previous block. The decentralized behavior of blockchain is best for IoT as an extensive network, because IoT must not have a single point of failure, and one entity must not decide what to do. All the capable storage devices will save the same data entered from any device, removing the risk of receiving altered data.
Miguel Sánchez‐de la Rosa, Carlos Núñez‐Gómez, Blanca Caminero, Carmen Carrión
Summary Fog computing has become a complementary technology to cloud computing and addresses some of the cloud computing threats such as the response time and network bandwidth demand. Fog computing successes processing data and storing data near to the edge, and usually is combined with container virtualization to provide hardware isolation. Empowered by these capabilities, numerous Internet of Things (IoT) applications are developed as virtualized instances on resource‐constrained fog nodes such as single‐board computers (SBC). In addition, blockchain has emerged as a key technology that is transforming the way we share information. Blockchain technology represents a decentralised, distributed, and immutable database ledger and is a potential solution for the distributed ecosystem of IoT applications. The distributed structure of blockchain is naturally suitable for IoT applications. However, it introduces new challenges related to CPU overhead or response time. This paper proposes a layered architecture that integrates blockchain technology and OS‐level virtualization technology to develop fog‐based IoT applications. It also provides insights for future deployments through a proof‐of‐concept use case harnessing SBCs, in this case Raspberry Pi, as blockchain‐enabled fog nodes to drive virtualized IoT applications. The study shows that the maximum CPU overhead added by a permissioned blockchain based on Ethereum on the Raspberry Pi is around a 25% under stress situations while the overhead introduced by the sealer process is negligible. These results support the feasibility of using blockchain on resource‐constrained fog nodes for supporting IoT applications.
Satisfying the world’s rapidly increasing demands in energy via the optimized management of available resources is becoming one of the most important research trends worldwide. When it comes to energy, it is very important to talk about decentralization, security, traceability and transparency. Thus, over the last few years, numerous research works have presented blockchain technology as the best novel business platform enabling a secure, transparent and tamper-proof energy management solution. In this paper, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) using the PRISMA framework of the different existing research studies related to the use of the blockchain technology in the energy sector, published between 2008 and 2021. We identified a total of 769 primary studies after intensive manual analysis and filtering, which we thoroughly assessed using various criteria to address six main research questions that covered the blockchain types, applications and platforms in the energy sector, the energy source types for which blockchain platforms are implemented, the emergent technologies that are combined to blockchain solutions, and the types of consensuses used in energy blockchains. Based on the collected survey data, we built a database to categorize the existing research works, identify research trends, and highlight knowledge gaps and potential areas for additional field study.
Christopher Maracchion, Timothy A. Woods, Sean Furman, Andrew Drozd
The use of private blockchains is proposed to enhance decentralized 5G-based DoD wireless network security, auditability, governance, and overall performance. This paper explores and validates methods for leveraging smart contracts and decentralized consensus mechanisms inherent to blockchain approaches to securely enhance wireless network performance. A real-time, decentralized architectural software implementation is postulated with detailed interfaces to determine how blockchain and smart contracts apply to real-world wireless networks based on a patented approach developed by the authors. Methods are presented for decentralized wireless networks to perform network arbitration, spectrum service level agreements, and business logic through low latency blockchain transactions. Simulation results characterize the performance of typical blockchain transaction latencies in decentralized wireless network paradigms to determine feasibility. Use case studies of federal and non-federal spectrum sharing are discussed that demonstrate how a private decentralized blockchain architecture and smart contracts can provide considerably improved wireless network performance.
Jun Wook Heo, Gowri Ramachandran, Ali Dorri, Raja Jurdak
Distribution, security, and immutability have led to the great success of blockchain in many applications, while contributing to major increases in ledger size. The storage challenge is one of the major barriers to the adoption of blockchain in the Internet of Things (IoT), which consists of many resource constrained devices. In this paper, we propose Multi-Level Distributed Caching (MLDC) for blockchain storage optimisation which reduces data replication based on data access patterns in a decentralised manner. For storage optimisation of data-centric blockchains, MLDC introduces a hierarchical storage class (SC), in which every node is assigned to an SC with its own Access Frequency (AF) threshold based on node availability. To reduce the number of replications shared among participant nodes, each node in a SC continues to remove unaccessed data from local storage based on a threshold time determined by the AF threshold of the SC, while maintaining all block hashes for consistency. Eventually, all nodes in MLDC store the most frequently accessed data in their local storage, so MLDC effectively reduces the storage and query costs while minimising network overhead. We also analyse the security of MLDC and quantitatively evaluate its performance for both the uniform access and exponentially decaying access patterns. The evaluation was carried out on a representative blockchain simulator with 15 storage nodes. Our results from 11 hours of experiments producing 6667 blocks and 39997 transactions show good performance for MLDC. The results of the experimentation for the exponentially decaying assess pattern show that MLDC can reduce the total storage cost by 83% compared to conventional blockchain systems, while maintaining blockchain consistency and data availability with a slight increase in network overhead and query cost.
Specializing Directed Acyclic Graph Federated Learning (SDAGFL) is a new federated learning framework with the advantages of decentralization, personalization, resisting a single point of failure, and poisoning attack. Instead of training a single global model, the clients in SDAGFL update their models asynchronously from the devices with similar data distribution through Directed Acyclic Graph Distributed Ledger Technology (DAG-DLT), which is designed for IoT scenarios. Because of many the features inherited from DAG-DLT, SDAGFL is suitable for IoT scenarios in many aspects. However, the training process of SDAGFL is quite energy consuming, in which each client needs to compute the confidence and rating of the nodes selected by multiple random walks by traveling the ledger with 15–25 depth to obtain the “reference model” to judge whether or not to broadcast the newly trained model. As we know, the energy consumption is an important issue for IoT scenarios, as most devices are battery-powered with strict energy restrictions. To optimize SDAGFL for IoT, an energy-efficient SDAGFL based on an event-triggered communication mechanism, i.e., ESDAGFL, is proposed in this paper. In ESDAGFL, the new model is broadcasted only in the event that the new model is significantly different from the previous one, instead of traveling the ledger to search for the “reference model”. We evaluate the ESDAGFL on the FMNIST-clustered and Poets dataset. The simulation is performed on a platform with Intel®CoreTM i7-10700 CPU (CA, USA). The simulation results demonstrate that ESDAGFL can reach a balance between training accuracy and specialization as good as SDAGFL. What is more, ESDAGFL can reduce the energy consumption by 42.5% and 51.7% for the FMNIST-clustered and Poets datasets, respectively.
This paper presents a model which delivers the prototype of an application that will store the URL shorten links in the decentralized network. Ethereum Blockchain is used for storing the links and also the proposed model overcomes the issues with earlier URL shorteners like Bitly and short URL. In this paper our research focuses on the two perspectives, viz: i) making a system design to handle traffic easily and ii) making such a system, which will remove the third party system. As a result, the proposed URL shortening service will give the users more trust to use this service with confidentiality, availability, and security consideration compared to the available used services.
Abstract Named data networking (NDN) has been viewed as a promising future Internet architecture due to its data-centric design. It requires a new security model that is orienting data but not devices. In this paper, an advanced hierarchical identity-based security mechanism by blockchain (AHISM-B) is to be proposed for the NDN networks. On one hand, the hierarchical identity-based cryptology is used to bind the data name to a public key. The valid public parameters would be requested by consumers with the Interest packets so that consumers would compose producers’ public keys to authenticate producers and verify the integrity of the Data packets. On the other hand, a blockchain is employed to manage public parameters to avoid catastrophes due to a single node failure. Both of the security proof result and the formal validation result indicate that the proposed AHISM-B is secure. Moreover, the simulation results show that the performance of our AHISM-B outperforms that of the classic NDN scheme. Especially, the average response delay of the AHISM-B scheme is less by 8% than that of the classic NDN scheme. With the increase of the average arrival rate of Interest packets, the advantage of the AHISM-B could be enhanced further to 11%.
Many IoT-blockchain systems in which blockchain connections run on an infrastructure-based network, such as Wi-Fi or LTE, face a severe problem: the single point of failure (SPoF) (i.e., depending on the availability, an access point of an LTE base station). Using infrastructure-less networks (i.e., ad hoc networks) is an efficient approach to prevent such highly disruptive events. An ad hoc network can automatically restore blockchain communication using an ad hoc routing protocol, even if a node fails. Moreover, an ad hoc routing protocol is more efficient when considering the IoT nodes’ mobility. In this paper, we first construct IoT-blockchain systems on emulated and real ad hoc networks with Ethereum and three ad hoc routing protocols (i.e., OLSR, BATMAN, and BABEL). We then evaluate the blockchain recovery time in static and mobile scenarios. The results show that BATMAN achieves the best blockchain recovery performance in all investigated scenarios because BATMAN only determines whether to switch a route by comparing the number of OGM packets received from a different next-hop. More specifically, in the small-scale real IoT-blockchain, BATMAN recovers at least 73.9% and 59.8% better than OLSR and BABEL, respectively. In the medium-scale emulated IoT-blockchain, the recovery time of BATMAN is at least 69% and 60% shorter than OLSR or BABEL, respectively.
With features like immutability and transparency, blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) can enable the telco industry to exchange services using smart contracts. Consequently, various 6G network stakeholders can participate in a marketplace for inter-provider agreements as either service providers or consumers. As, a blockchain-based 6G network can aid administrative domains in sharing resources (virtual network functions, services, or slices). However, such a dynamic environment requires strict Service Level Agreement (SLA) monitoring and management. Therefore, this paper considers a use case of a smart contract-based inter-provider agreement. We use novel solutions like IOTA Tangle to perform transactions, IPFS to store the hash of use case data files, and chainlink to access off-chain data feeds for SLA monitoring, reducing costs and increasing transparency. We also provide experimental evaluations of and divide the emulation into two phases. Phase 1 consists of choosing the approach and creating a smart contract (SC) (i.e., SC-Marketplace or SC-Auction). Furthermore, phase 2 consists of off-chain data feed to monitor SLA through chainlink. Finally, we measure transaction latency, response time, overall time consumption, and transaction & storage cost. The maximum latency observed in phase 1 is$\approx 25\text{ms}$and$\approx 15\mathrm{s}$for phase 2. Similarly, the average response time for both phases is$\approx 14\mathrm{s}$~ 20s. Lastly, the results also explain that using IOTA-EVM, we can have fee-less transactions, and IPFS helps reduce the storage cost by up to$\approx 80\%$. However, it is concluded that adding chainlink adds additional cost for SLA data feeds.
Damilare Peter Oyinloye, Je Sen Teh, Norziana Jamil, Jiashen Teh
Blockchain is a distributed ledger in which participating users with varying levels of trust agree on the ledger’s content using a consensus mechanism called consensus protocols. There has been a rising interest in the design of consensus protocols since they play a central role in blockchain architecture. However, many recently proposed consensus protocols lack experimental verification which hampers the possible deployment of these protocols in real-world blockchain networks. In this article, we propose a simple tool called simplified consensus protocol simulator (SIM-P) that can accurately simulate the behavior of these consensus protocols with ease. It is an agent-based stochastic simulator that relies on the sequential Monte Carlo method to model how block publishers are selected. The likelihood of each node (represented as agents) being selected as a block publisher is represented by independent trials in a binomial experiment. We provide a base SIM-P model that simulates Proof of Work (PoW) for benchmarking purposes. The PoW model also serves as the basic structure of the simulator that can be adapted to other protocols. We showcase the flexibility of SIM-P by proposing two additional simulation models for Proof of Reputation-X and Proof of Contribution, both of which lack experimental verification in their original design specifications. We show how the simulator can be used to produce vital metrics, such as throughput, resistance against the 51% attack, and energy consumption. We verify the accuracy of SIM-P by comparing PoW’s simulated results with theoretical estimates and historical Bitcoin data.
In the era of big data, data is playing an increasingly important role in scientific study, and reliable storage and secure sharing of data have become a research hotspot. At present, centralized solutions based on data centers and cloud storage have problems with data-right confirmation and center trust. A large number of decentralized storage solutions are public systems, in which blockchain technology, as a tool for value exchange, does not solve the problems of data verification and system supervision. We propose a peer-to-peer storage system with identity access, which achieves data validation, cross-organizational data retrieval, trusted authorization, and sharing based on the consortium blockchain. Our solution proposes a peer-to-peer data storage scheme based on the consortium blockchain and a set of identity authentication mechanisms compatible with the consortium blockchain. Based on this, we propose a blockchain-based permission control scheme and a set of retrieval, authorization, and sharing processes. Finally, we implemented and tested the system to prove the feasibility of the scheme.