Blockchain Papers

Nikolay Buldakov, Timur Khalilev, Salvatore Distefano, Manuel Mazzara

No abstract is available for this record.

Ahsan Manzoor, Max Samarin, David Mason, Mika Ylianttila

Distributed Ledger Technology, has been gaining enormous attention in areas beyond cryptocurrency. Industries such as energy, transportation, and healthcare are already integrating DLTs into their operations. On the other hand, recent advances and the increasing popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are also enabling new and exciting ways of interaction and sensing for mobile device users. Mobile gaming is another prominent industry that can be benefited from these technological developments and has the potential to create business opportunities. In this paper, we explore the uses of Distributed Ledger Technology in Mobile Gaming and for this purpose, we have taken a location-based IoT mobile gaming use case and propose new gaming features for the players by the addition of the DLT. We propose a platform for creating and playing scavenger hunt games using low-power BLE beacons. It allows smartphones to interact with the predetermined real-world locations and players can observe the surrounding environment looking for “clues” in the game. At the end of a hunt, the player receives rewards that are stored on a distributed ledger as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) and can bring in-game advantages for the next hunts. The proposed system is implemented using off-the-shelf devices and IoT beacons. We implemented our hybrid architecture by using AWS Lambda, Hyperledger Fabric managed blockchain and DynamoDB. We performed multiple experiments measuring the time taken for the end-to-end process, IoT beacon response times and the throughput of the Fabric network. Using the performance results, we estimated the maximum number of active players that can be supported by the game. Finally, we discuss business opportunities and limitations of the proposed proof of concept.

Jinhua Ma, Shih-Ya Lin, Xin Chen, Hung–Min Sun · 6 authors

In recent years, blockchain has received increasing attention and numerous applications have emerged from this technology. A renowned Blockchain application is the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, that has not only been effectively solving the double-spending problem but also it can confirm the legitimacy of transactional records without relying on a centralized system to do so. Therefore, any application using Blockchain technology as the base architecture ensures that the contents of its data are tamper-proof. This paper uses the decentralized Blockchain technology approach to ensure that consumers do not fully rely on the merchants to determine if products are genuine. We describe a decentralized Blockchain system with products anti-counterfeiting, in that way manufacturers can use this system to provide genuine products without having to manage direct-operated stores, which can significantly reduce the cost of product quality assurance.

Ala Ekramifard, Haleh Amintoosi, Amin Hosseini Seno, Ali Dehghantanha · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Tariq Alsboui, Yongrui Qin, Richard Hill, Hussain Al-Aqrabi

No abstract is available for this record.

Yijun Zou, Ting Meng, Peng Zhang, Zhang Wen-zhen · 5 authors

As a decentralized distributed ledger, blockchain has developed rapidly since its birth and has been highly valued by governments, academia, and industry. Start in the financial field, blockchain technology has been rapidly applied to various fields such as the Internet of Things, supply chain, and healthcare. Blockchain technology has made sufficient development and innovation, but it also faces many challenges, such as security, scalability, and waste of resources. This paper starts with the development history of blockchain and combines the characteristics and technical principles of it to analyze the current academic research status and application scenarios. Meanwhile, this paper analyzes the existing outstanding blockchain projects and elaborates on their key advantages and current challenges. With discussing the ongoing development trend of blockchain, the development direction, and the research trend of blockchain in the future, this paper provides a useful reference for related research.

Abdellah Kaci, Abderrezak Rachedi

In blockchain, transactions between parties are regrouped into blocks, in order to be added to the blockchain's distributed ledger. Miners are nodes of the network that generate new blocks that meet the consensus protocol. Thus, when a miner adds a valid block to the distributed ledger, the miner is rewarded. Due to the difficulty of the problem to be solved by the miner in order to find a valid block, it becomes difficult to a single miner to gain rewards. Therefore, miners join mining pools, where the powers of miners are federated to ensure stable revenues for miners. In public blockchains, access to mining pools is not restricted, which makes mining pools vulnerable to considerable threats such as: block withholding (BWH) attacks and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. In the present work, we a new blockchain named PoolCoin that manages reputation in mining pools. In addition, we provide a trust model for PoolCoin, inspired by the job market signaling model. The proposed PoolCoin blockchain allows pool managers to accept trusted miners in their mining pools, while miners are able to evaluate pool managers. The performance evaluation is conducted and the obtained simulation results are presented and discussed. In order to study the efficiency of the proposed trust model, a performance evaluation was provided. Thus, the model parameters' are optimized in order to detect and exclude misbehaving miners, while honest miners are maintained in the mining pool.

Zehui Xiong, Yang Zhang, Nguyen Cong Luong, Dusit Niyato · 6 authors

The rapid proliferation of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices has brought great challenges of data management, i.e., storing, retrieving and manipulating a large volume of IoT data. Conventional IoT systems rely on centralized architectures to manage IoT data, hence suffering from limited scalability, lack of transparency, and single point of failure issues. As such, we employ blockchain as a distributed ledger to support the decentralized approach of data management in IoT systems, where IoT data are stored in the deployed blockchain for further utilization, e.g., retrieve and audit. A general architecture combining blockchain and IoT systems is presented. Nevertheless, as the resource constraints of IoT devices may still exist during the process of data transmissions from IoT devices to the blockchain network, we propose a case study of a learning-assisted resource allocation method to support intelligent data management. The numerical results show that the proposed scheme achieves superior performance compared with baseline solutions.

Tanesh Kumar, Erkki Harjula, Muneeb Ejaz, Ahsan Manzoor · 9 authors

Industry 4.0 encompasses a promise of a new industrial revolution in terms of providing secure, intelligent, autonomous and self-adaptive industrial IoT (IIoT) networks. Key industrial applications and systems will be significantly more complex due to the involvement of the vast number of different devices and diverse nature of various stakeholders and service providers. These complex industrial processes, services and applications also have strict requirements in terms of performance - latency in particular - and resource-efficiency, together with high standards for security and trust. In this context, Blockchain and Edge Computing emerge as prominent technologies to address the mentioned essential requirements and to further strengthen the rise of the new era of digitization. The Edge computing paradigm ensures low latency services for IIoT applications while optimizing the network usage, whereas Blockchain provides a decentralized way for ensuring data integrity, trust and security. In this paper, we propose a `BlockEdge' framework that combines these two enabling technologies to address some of the critical issues faced by the current IIoT networks. We verify the feasibility of our approach by evaluating the performance and resource-efficiency of BlockEdge in terms of latency, power consumption and network usage, through simulations against non-Blockchain solution.

Zhenyu Zhou, Xinyi Chen, Yan Zhang, Shahid Mumtaz

In the future 5G paradigm, billions of machinetype devices will be deployed to enable wide-area and ubiquitous data sensing, collection, and transmission. Considering the traffic characteristics of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and the spectrum shortage dilemma, a cost-efficient solution is to share the underutilized spectrum allocated to human-to-human (H2H) users with M2M devices in an opportunistic manner. However, the implementation of large-scale spectrum sharing in 5G heterogeneous networks confronts many challenges, including lack of incentive mechanism, privacy leakage, security threats, and so on. This motivates us to develop a privacy-preserved, incentive-compatible, and spectrum-efficient framework based on blockchain, which is implemented in two stages. First, H2H users sign a contract with the base station for spectrum sharing, and receive dedicated payments based on their contributions. Next, the shared spectrum is allocated to M2M devices to maximize the total throughput. We elaborate the operation details of secure spectrum sharing, incentive mechanism design, and efficient spectrum allocation. A case study is presented to demonstrate the security and efficiency of the proposed framework. Finally, we outline several open issues and conclude this article.

Sandeep Kadam, Shajimon K. John

No abstract is available for this record.

Stamatellis, Charalampos, Pavlos Papadopoulos, Nikolaos Pitropakis, Sokratis Katsikas · 5 authors

Electronic health record (EHR) management systems require the adoption of effective technologies when health information is being exchanged. Current management approaches often face risks that may expose medical record storage solutions to common security attack vectors. However, healthcare-oriented blockchain solutions can provide a decentralized, anonymous and secure EHR handling approach. This paper presents PREHEALTH, a privacy-preserving EHR management solution that uses distributed ledger technology and an Identity Mixer (Idemix). The paper describes a proof-of-concept implementation that uses the Hyperledger Fabric's permissioned blockchain framework. The proposed solution is able to store patient records effectively whilst providing anonymity and unlinkability. Experimental performance evaluation results demonstrate the scheme's efficiency and feasibility for real-world scale deployment.

Ramesh Sekaran, Rizwan Patan, Arunprasath Raveendran, Fadi Al‐Turjman · 6 authors

Internet of Things (IoT) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) technology acts as a significant part of daily lives to facilitate control and monitoring of objects to revolutionize the ways that human interacts with physical world. IoT system includes large volume of data with network connectivity, power, and storage resources to transform data into meaningful information. Blockchain has decentralized nature to provide useful mechanism for addressing IoT challenges. Blockchain is distributed ledger with fundamental attributes, namely recorded, transparent, and decentralized. Blockchain formed participants in distributed ledger to record the transactions and communicate with other through trustless method. Security is considered as the most valuable features of Blockchain. IoT and Blockchain are emerging ideas for creating the applications to share the intrinsic features. Several existing works has been developed for the integration of blockchain with IoT. But, Blockchain protocols in the state-of-the-art works with IoT failed to consider the computational loads, delays, and bandwidth overhead which lead to new set of problems. The review estimates main challenges in integration of Blockchain and IoT technologies to attain high-level solutions by addressing the shortcomings and limitations of IoT and Blockchain technologies.

A. S. M. Sanwar Hosen, Saurabh Singh, Pradip Kumar Sharma, Uttam Ghosh · 7 authors

Blockchain is attracting more and more attention to its applicability in the fields of Internet of Things (IoT). In particular, it is able to store data in unalterable blocks, associated with its secure peer-to-peer in a growing problem of transaction authorization in industrial and service provisioning applications. Moreover, it facilitates decentralized transaction (TX) validation and distributed ledger. The underneath algorithm of TX selection for validation may not be effective in terms of delay of various services of the applications. Because the existing random-based or fee-based selections are a delay insensitive that does not guarantee a minimum delay of a time-critical TX. This paper proposes a blockchain-based transaction validation protocol for a secure distributed IoT network. It includes a context-aware TX validation technique, where a TX is validated by a miner with the priority of a service. Besides, we adopt the Software Defined Networking enabled gateway as a middleware between IoT and the blockchain network in which the control operations and security of the network in a largescale are ensured. The proposed network model has evaluated and compared to the Core network. The results ensure the given priority in TX validation is more delay sensitive than the existing technique to provide quality of service of the network.

S Krishnapriya, Greeshma Sarath

The current land registration process involves a lot of vulnerabilities and people uses it to cheat the common people and the government. This paper discusses about a secure land registry implemented using blockchain which works on the basis of majority consensus. By implementing the land registry in blockchain, the security issue is resolved to a great extent. The hash value calculated for each block will be unique as it is linked to the hash of the previous block. The algorithm that is used for hashing is SHA256. Along with SHA256, Proof Of Work(PoW) algorithm is also used which makes the information related to each transaction more secure. Message digest that is generated for each block is of fixed size and each hash represents a complete set of transaction within a given block. The proposed land registry blockchain network consists of 12 nodes which calculates the proof of work. Nodes are responsible for verifying a transaction, mining a new block and adding the new block to the blockchain. A total of 200 land transactions are recorded using the blockchain methodology which offers a tamper proof and updated version of land registry. Elliptic curve cryptographic algorithm is used for signature generation which is used for verifying whether the transaction is signed by the owner or not. Merkle tree is used for linking the transactions using hash and in turn reduces the disk usage. The proposed implementation of land registry using blockchain thus offers a 99% reduction in manual effort spent in record keeping.

Abir El Azzaoui, Sushil Kumar Singh, Yi Pan, Jong Hyuk Park

Nowadays, 5G network is considered to be one of the main pillars of various industries, including the Internet of Things (IoT), smart cities, virtual reality, and many more. Unlike previous network generations, 5G utilizes complex digital technologies such as massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (mMIMO) and runs over higher radio frequencies. The introduction of new technologies and advanced features in the 5G network raises new challenges for network operators, and merging Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the effective solutions to address these complexities. However, AI-enabled 5G network engenders security concerns and requires improvement to meet the standardization and qualification of the new network generation. To mitigate these dilemmas, Blockchain must be integrated. Blockchain, as a decentralized methodology provides a secure sharing of information and resources among various nodes of 5G environments. Blockchain can support other technologies, such as AI-based 5G, to create smarter, more efficient, and secure cellular networks. In this article, we present a comprehensive intelligence and secure data analytics framework for 5G networks based on the convergence of Blockchain and AI named “Block5GIntell”. We depict the applications of Blockchain and AI on 5G networks separately and we argue on the support that Blockchain can provide for AI to create smart and secure 5G networks relying on our proposed framework. To support our proposition, we present an energy-saving case study using Blockchain for AI-enabled 5G. The simulation shows an overall 20% decrease in energy consumption at the RAN level.

Paul Kengfai Wan, Lizhen Huang, Halvor Holtskog

A supply chain consists of many stakeholders such as suppliers, carriers and customers. It is often complex due to the rapid development of economic globalization and the intense competition pressure in the market which resulted in information sharing within a supply chain to be fragmented. Blockchain technology can solve this problem by having only a “one trusted ledger” that could reshape the element of data trust. The goal of this paper is to identify and understand the impact of blockchain technology for information sharing within a supply chain. The decentralized nature of blockchain technology offers a high level of transparency and has gained the attention from various sectors to deploy this technology. A systematic literature review in the academic literature was conducted using different databases. Blockchain-enabled information sharing can add value to enhance collaborative work in different types of supply chains such as health and medical, construction and smart city. From our findings, one potential impact of deploying blockchain-enabled information sharing within a supply chain is that it ensures all members in the chain can obtain verified information which enhances collaborative partnerships. Through this in-depth research, we highlighted potential barriers that could impede the development of blockchain technology in supply chain such as the lack of understanding of blockchain technology in businesses and conflict of interests. Future work such as information hiding, in parallel with information sharing, could close the gap in deploying this technology within a supply chain. Understanding the nature of different supply chain is also important to better prepare the deployment of blockchain. We acknowledge that our approach in selecting literatures in our systematic review may exclude certain literatures. Nonetheless, we tried to include as many relevant literatures as possible, to develop a roadmap on the current situation of blockchain-enabled information sharing within a supply chain.

Kamalendu Pal, Ansar-Ul-Haque Yasar

The rapid changes in textile and clothing industry's operational environment in which apparel businesses are collaborating with their suppliers and customers have recognized interoperability of information systems as an important factor. The need to address this challenge becomes vital in the context of new paradigms such as the Internet of Things (IoT), and its ability to capture realtime information from different parts of textile and cloth manufacturing value chain by using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags and sensors-based data communication networks. In this process, enterprise information system architecture plays an important role in storing, processing, and distributing data. Despite contributing to the rapid development of IoT applications, the current IoT-centric architecture has led to a myriad of isolated data silos. This paper presents a blockchain-based architecture for the IoT applications, which brings distributed data management to support transactions services within a multi-party apparel business supply chain network.

Anichur Rahman, Mostofa Kamal Nasir, Ziaur Rahman, Amir Mosavi · 6 authors

Security, privacy, and transparency aspects of the Internet of Things (IoT) sensors have recently raised significant concerns among the public and policymakers. The distributed ledger and Blockchain technologies had brought solutions through transparently bridging two or multiple untrusted parties. In this research, a novel architecture for a smart building system, including a control system and automatic approaches, is proposed. An efficient cluster head selection algorithm is proposed to select the desired cluster head with the consideration of low energy consumption and fast head selection. An enhanced combination of IoT forwarding devices and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technology is further advanced. Furthermore, the proposed “DistBlockBuilding” architecture is implemented for managing a safe and secure data transfer from one surface to another surface. Besides, Blockchain technology is performed for transferring data within the smart building. Finally, the performance of IoT-SDN based secured networks is evaluated.

Yogesh Sharma, B. Balamurugan

Electronic health records (EHRs) are health information of patients that are saved digitally in a network. Various opportunities to enhance patient care, performance measures in clinical practice and contribute to clinical research in the future are provided by EHRs. The schemes used to store EHRs have been very insecure in the present era of smart cities and homes. The data can be easily breached by hackers and unauthorized external parties. Also, the data is not accessible to patients and care providers. These schemes are unable to create a balance between data security and data accessibility. But blockchain can resolve these issues. Blockchain creates a ledger system that is immutable and allows the transactions to take place in a decentralized manner. The three main features of blockchain technology - Security, Decentralization, and Transparency make any application built using it secure and not accessible by unauthorized parties. The manipulation of data is almost impossible to do in a blockchain network. In this project, we propose a system to implement EHRs using blockchain technology and make EHRs more secure and private. The blockchain technology will keep control over access to information using its cryptographic techniques and decentralization. It will also maintain the balance between data privacy and data accessibility. Our main objective of this project is the framing of data privacy and security issues in electronic healthcare

Raifa Akkaoui, Xiaojun Hei, Wenqing Cheng

Recently, researchers around the world in medical institutions and pharmaceutical companies are demanding a wider access to healthcare data for secondary use in order to provide enhanced and personalized medical services. For this purpose, healthcare information exchange between health authorities can be leveraged as a fundamental concept to meet these demands and enable the discovery of new insights and cures. However, health data are highly sensitive and private information that requires strong authentication and authorization procedures to manage the access to them. In this regard, the cloud paradigm has been used in these e-healthcare solutions, but they remain inefficient due to their inability to adapt to the expanding volume of data generated from body sensors and their vulnerability against cyberattacks. Hence, collaborative and distributed data governance supported by edge computing and blockchain promises enormous potentials in improving the performance and security of the whole system. In this paper, we present a secure and efficient data management framework, named ”EdgeMediChain”, for sharing health data. The proposed architecture leverages both edge computing and blockchain to facilitate and provide the necessary requirements for a healthcare ecosystem in terms of scalability, security, as well as privacy. The Ethereum-based testbed evaluations show the effectiveness of EdgeMediChain in terms of execution time with a reduction of nearly 84.75% for 2000 concurrent transactions, higher throughput compared to a traditional blockchain, and scalable ledger storage with a linear growth rate.

Bahar Houtan, Abdelhakim Hafid, Dimitrios Makrakis

Convergence of physical and digital identity and integration of various individual records, such as patient data, into a united repository remains a serious challenge. On one hand, collecting relevant data can help clinicians, specialists and healthcare service providers to facilitate care for patients. On the other hand, Self-Sovereign identity and the right to control personal data comes into question, because patients do not handle their data explicitly. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a novel method which would allow to securely record time-stamped data and enable patient-driven health and identity records. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art in Blockchain (BC)-based self-sovereignty and patient data records in healthcare. Our motivation is to investigate the potential of BC technology for use in the patient data and identity management. As a distributed decentralized technology, BC can be very beneficial, giving patients control over their own data and self-sovereign identity. To the extent of our knowledge, there is no literature covering the same concerns. More specifically, the focus is on solutions that aim the realization of holistic BC-based Electronic Health Records (EHR) and Patient Health Records (PHR). EHR and PHR are used to record patient data, such as the doctor's notes upon a visit and radiology images. Hence, they include critical information regarding patient's privacy and identity. Therefore, development of pure decentralized Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) is a great challenge in terms of architectural and technical structure of the systems. Designing robust and reliable EHR and PHR, which represent the foundation of many other healthcare services, relies on carefully finding the balance in a trade-off between many factors, such as level of decentralization, privacy, scalability and data throughput. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art and provide an analysis on the design trade-offs.

Aleksandr Ometov, Yulia Bardinova, Alexandra Afanasyeva, Pavel Mašek · 10 authors

The blockchain technology is currently penetrating different areas of the modern Information and Communications Technology community. Most of the devices involved in blockchain-related processes are specially designed targeting only the mining aspect, i.e., solving the computational puzzle task. At the same time, the use of wearable and mobile devices may also become a part of eCommerce blockchain operation, especially during the on-charge time. The paper considers the possibility of using a large number of constrained devices to support the operation of the blockchain with a low impact on battery consumption. The utilization of such devices is expected to improve the system efficiency as well as to attract a more substantial number of users. This paper contributes to the body of knowledge with a survey of the main applications of blockchain for smartphones along with existing mobile blockchain projects. It also proposes a novel consensus protocol based on a combination of Proof-of-Work (PoW), Proof-of-Activity (PoA), and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) algorithms for efficient and on-the-fly utilization on resource-constrained devices. The system was deployed in a worldwide testnet with more than two thousand smartphones and compared with other projects from the user-experienced metrics perspective. The results prove that the utilization of PoA systems on a smartphone does not significantly affect the lifetime of the smartphone battery while existing methods based on PoW have a tremendous negative impact. Finally, the main open challenges and future investigation directions are outlined.

Yan Pang

Blockchain is widely recognized as a potential disruptive technology that has gained much popularity recently. Despite many promising results, the current blockchain landscape is fragmented, in which many blockchain systems exist in silos. Interoperability becomes a critical functionality to facilitate broad blockchain adoption and starts to attract attention in both industry and academia research. In this paper, we propose a new consensus protocol, Multi-tokens Proof of Stake (MPoS), for blockchain interoperability architecture. The MPoS protocol is able to strengthen the token network effects in a cross-chain ecosystem and grow the user base of blockchain systems dramatically. We also provide an analytical model to analyze and prove that the MPoS protocol can offer better security than traditional single-token PoS consensus protocols.