The integration of blockchain with edge computing technology has emerged as a popular topic in recent years. Edge computing offers many advantages to IoT data computing by reducing the bandwidth in the cloud, whereas blockchain offers a promising solution to the data integrity issues of dynamic edge nodes. There is considerable technological mismatch, however, when employing a blockchain protocol for edge computing. Standard edge nodes usually deal with big data and require constant data exchange over time, whereas traditional blockchains prevent the storage of big data in a distributed network. This study presents a novel blockchain architecture called Recordchain, which is fully adapted to the edge computing environment. The innovative feature of Recordchain is its ability to locate actual data separately while providing security, scalability, and performance, thus addressing the storage utilization issues related to big data. The efficiency and performance of the proposed architecture is further demonstrated experimentally.
In recent years, due to the wide implementation of mobile agents, the Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks have been applied in several real-life scenarios, servicing applications in the areas of public safety, proximity-based services, and fog computing. Meanwhile, when more complex tasks are processed in IoT networks, demands on identity authentication, certifiable traceability, and privacy protection for services in IoT networks increase. Building a blockchain system in IoT networks can greatly satisfy such demands. However, the blockchain building in IoT brings about new challenges compared with that in the traditional full-blown Internet with reliable transmissions, especially in terms of achieving consensus on each block in complex wireless environments, which directly motivates our work. In this study, we fully considered the challenges of achieving a consensus in a blockchain system in IoT networks, including the negative impacts caused by contention and interference in wireless channel, and the lack of reliable transmissions and prior network organizations. By proposing a distributed consensus algorithm for blockchains on multi-hop IoT networks, we showed that it is possible to directly reach a consensus for blockchains in IoT networks, without relying on any additional network layers or protocols to provide reliable and ordered communications. In our theoretical analysis, we showed that our consensus algorithm is asymptotically optimal on time complexity and is energy saving. The extensive simulation results also validate our conclusions in the theoretical analysis.
Distributed ledger technology (DLT) offers new and unique advantages for information systems, but some of its features are not a good fit for many applications. We review the properties of DLT and propose a new type of architecture for DLT based on main-sub ledger. Our scheme pays more attention to data privacy, effectively relieves the pressure of data storage for nodes, thereby improves data handling capability.
A deeper decarbonization perspective is undergoing with the increasing engagement of new distributed players and the deployment of innovative behind-the-meter flexibility services. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) trading has emerged as an innovative mechanism to foster the direct energy sharing among multi-level market players with pre-determined responsibility and privacy. However, compared with other P2P assets trading, P2P energy trading is facing huge challenges in achieving a large-scale commercialization due to the cooperation obstacles between non-professional distributed players and regulated players as Distributed System Operator (DSO), Transmission System Operator (TSO) and utilities. It is related to not only business and marketing, but also energy system operation to keep secure and reliable with injection of new roles, new utilization patterns, and new markets. This paper investigates the socio-technical interaction and mechanism for the sustainable P2P energy trading from the social dimension on the cooperation of multi-level market players, the technical dimension on the cutting-edge exchange of flexibility, and the economical dimension on the inter-operative decentralized/regulated marketplaces. Three questions are targeted on: (1) How Information and Communication Technology (ICT) enables co-creation of decentralized heterogeneous user-centered digital frameworks for the large-scale P2P trading interaction, (2) What specific energy services drive the cross-border interactions for exchange of multi-scale P2P flexibility, (3) How operational framework in P2P energy trading achieves the inter-operative marketplaces with the formation of trusted P2P energy society and the injection of multi-scale flexibility services. Finally, regulation challenges on P2P energy trading implementation are discussed for the guide of future work.
There is a resurgence of interest in Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) systems due to blockchains. However, leader-based BFT consensus protocols used by permissioned blockchains have limited scalability and robustness. To alleviate the leader bottleneck in BFT consensus, we introduce Stratus, a robust shared mempool protocol that decouples transaction distribution from consensus. Our idea is to have replicas disseminate transactions in a distributed manner and have the leader only propose transaction ids. Stratus uses a provably available broadcast (PAB) protocol to ensure the availability of the referenced transactions. We implemented and evaluated Stratus by integrating it with state-of-the-art BFT-based blockchain protocols and evaluated these protocols in both LAN and WAN settings. Our results show that Stratus-based protocols achieve up to $5\sim20\times$ more throughput than their native counterparts in a network with hundreds of replicas. In addition, the performance of Stratus degrades gracefully in the presence of network asynchrony, Byzantine attackers, and unbalanced workloads. Our design provides easy-to-use APIs so that other BFT systems suffering from leader bottlenecks can use Stratus.
The increasing prevalence of renewable energy resources introduces a high variability that complicates the task of energy management in modern power grids. Among other technologies, batteries have proven effective in managing power imbalances in such grids. However, the high cost of large-scale batteries, coupled with their enormous space requirements, could deter their adoption by large consumers such as shared facility controllers. The aggregation of residential energy storage units offers shared facility controllers (SFCs) an alternative way to leverage storage; however, a secure scheme that promotes fairness and transparency in the selection and compensation of shared storage unit owners is needed. To this end, an Ethereum smart contract that makes residential storage capacities available to SFCs via a double auction mechanism is proposed. The contract is written with solidity and deployed in the browser-based Remix-integrated development environment. Scenario tests prove the effectiveness of the smart contract in selecting and compensating the owners of shared storage capacities, according to predefined auction rules.
This paper proposes a solution for validating an End-to-End service chain built by multiple actors that may not trust each other. We notably introduce a “data layer” powered by a Distributed Ledger (DL, a.k.a “Blockchain”) using a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). This component will enable all players involved in a network service chain to share trusted and secure performance data, whilst avoiding the participation of trusted third parties. We consider as a driving use case a scenario where resource providers and resource consumers (a.k.a “prosumers”) interact together to build on-demand network services. We thus focus on a Cloud-based Radio Access Network scenario and anticipate network disaggregation, allowing the infrastructure to be shared between multiple providers. We show through simulation that the usage of a DAG-based ledger will make the proposed data layer scalable despite the amount of performance data required for monitoring.
A blockchain network is a collection of nodes that are interconnected with each other. One of the toughest tasks on these nodes is as a mining node. Playing an active role as a node miner in a blockchain network requires enormous resources, especially on blockchain networks that implement Proof-of-work consensus. Solo miners will get an enormous reward but require hardware resources with very high computing capabilities. Therefore, the pool miner approach or miners who work in groups will have more benefit because the group will jointly support the very high computational needs. However, the rewards that each miner node will obtain will be adjusted based on the contribution made. This paper presents a mining pool simulator for blockchain applications called BCSimMP (a Blockchain Simulator with Mining Pool). BCSimMP simulates using Proof-of-Work consensus and also simulates a group of miners (pool miners) working together to solve the existing puzzle to generate a block. The simulator is using the multiprocessing mechanism in Python. In addition, leading-zero is used as a puzzle to solve during block-time generation. The share reward for each participant node miner and a special reward for a miner that can solve the puzzle. Our application shows the mining process carried out by miners in groups compare to a solo miner. The user can initially set the number of node users, the number of tasks/transactions per block, the number of node miners, and the difficulty level for the target puzzle. The reward given for successfully generating blocks on this application is distributed proportionally to all miners in the group. With this BCSimMP, users can learn how the mining pool works and the mechanism of the rewards obtained before deciding to join as a miner in the blockchain network.
Peer to peer (P2P) and blockchain are highly coupled in terms of decentralization and autonomous transactions. This paper designs a P2P power transaction mechanism based on block chain to meet the economic and security requirements of photovoltaic prosumer. Day-ahead and real-time P2P trading mechanism is designed. Fully open P2P trading mode and decentralized electricity price mechanism are adopted in day-ahead market, and P2P pool trading mode and electricity price mechanism based on supply/demand ratio are adopted in real-time market. In addition, smart contract rules based on blockchain Ethereum are designed to ensure safe operation and efficient intelligence on the blockchain platform. Finally, effectiveness and economy Prosumer P2P trading mechanism in IEEE 14-node simulation and verification of the design.
Astrid Carolina Ordonez-Guerrero, Juan David Munoz-Garzon, Edgar Roberto Dulce Villarreal, Ajay Bandi · 5 authors
Blockchain is an emerging technology whose main characteristic is decentralized and distributed architecture with-out depending on a central server. Blockchain broadens the spectrum by providing a shared infrastructure that securely stores information and executes programs, making it a very disruptive technology. Because blockchain is a relatively novel technology, there is insufficient knowledge about architectural concerns for designing and evaluating blockchain-based solutions. In this paper, we report a systematic mapping study, giving a broader landscape of the blockchain-based architectural concerns, such as quality attributes, tactics, and patterns related to the architectural design space with blockchain. From the current literacy, this study unveils these concerns and their relationships. Software architects can use these concerns for analyzing, designing, assessing, or refactoring their blockchain-based solutions.
Abstract Blockchain is a distributed ledger based on peer‐to‐peer networks, originally used for crypto‐currency systems. Blockchains are being used as an enabling technology for decentralised applications in the areas of Internet‐of‐Things, finance, supply‐chain and others. Consistency, data privacy, performance, and energy efficiency are of paramount importance in such applications. The full nodes of public, permissionless blockchains undertake the task of verifying the transactions generated by the network. Full nodes perform operations such as confirming balances, transactions, and history, i.e. mostly database search queries. Consequently, their throughput is crucial for the performance of blockchain systems. In this work, the benefits of accelerating the blockchain search and insert queries by leveraging GPU platforms are studied. An extensive comparison between the most dominant utilized database is provided, i.e. LevelDB, and MegaKV, a high‐performance GPU‐accelerated database. Realistic operations that take place in blockchain systems are emulated and evaluated over representative scenarios, showing three orders of magnitude gains in throughput and energy efficiency without compromising the security aspect. The extensive comparison between LevelDB and MegaKV indicates that GPU acceleration is an effective solution for runtime and energy efficiency enhancement of blockchain systems, and the integration of the two technologies is a promising field of research.
In the last few years, electric utility companies have increasingly invested into transactive energy systems. This trend was primarily caused by the integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) and internet-of-things (IoT) devices into their existing distribution networks. Influenced by the general interest in blockchain technologies, many industry specialists are considering new, more efficient peer-to-peer market structures for DERs. Since blockchain-based energy exchanges can automate transactions between their members and provide increased levels of security thanks to smart contracts, these new initiatives may eventually revolutionize how customers interact with utility companies. In this paper, we explore the trade-off between cost and traceability in the form of on-chain and off-chain solutions. We also propose ZipZap, a first step towards a blockchain-based local smart grid system. ZipZap is an ERC-1155 compliant solution with four different prototypes: Heavyweight, Featherweight, Lightweight and Weightless. The first three prototypes were developed in Solidity and deployed using Ethereum. Heavyweight is fully on-chain, whereas Featherweight and Lightweight showcase various levels of hybridization. Weightless, in turn, was deployed using Quorum, a gas-free alternative to Ethereum. Our evaluation uses realistic parameters and measures the impact of different types of metadata storage scopes, with some Ethereum prototypes showcasing gas cost reductions of more than 97% in comparison to our fully on-chain baseline.
Abstract : People’s lives have been profoundly impacted by the headway of innovation which has worked on their lives from each viewpoint. Clearly, innovation assumes a significant part in each circle of life and information stockpiling and sharing is a significant part of it. Current information sharing and storage devices depend on trusted third parties (TTP) and because of the contribution of third parties, such frameworks need straightforwardness, security, trust and strength. To solve these issues, this paper proposes a blockchain-based secure information sharing application by consolidating the highlights of IPFS and Ethereum. In this proposed scheme ethereum blockchain, decentralized storage, encryption and IPFS are combined to build an application that maximizes the tech<em>nological resources and provide</em> with an effective storage website ,Ethereum blockchain, decentralized capacity, encryption, and InterPlanetary File System are consolidated to assemble an application that boosts the innovative assets and gives a viable storage site. To carry out the proposed situation, smart contracts are written in solidity and sent on the nearby Ethereum test network. The proposed plot accomplishes security, transparency, legitimacy of owner, access control and nature of information.
Light clients for distributed ledger networks can verify blockchain integrity by downloading and analyzing blockchain headers. They are designed to circumvent the high resource requirements, i.e., the large bandwidth and memory requirements that full nodes must meet, which are unsuitable for consumer-grade hardware and resource-constrained devices. Light clients rely on full nodes and trust them implicitly. This leaves them vulnerable to various types of attacks, ranging from accepting maliciously forged data to Eclipse attacks. We introduce Aurora-Trinity, a novel version of light clients that addresses the above-mentioned vulnerability by relying on our original Aurora module, which extends the Ethereum Trinity client. The Aurora module efficiently discovers the presence of malicious or Byzantine nodes in distributed ledger networks with a predefined and acceptable error rate and identifies at least one honest node for persistent or ephemeral communication. The identified honest node is used to detect the latest canonical chain head or to infer the state of an entry in the ledger without downloading the header chain, making the Aurora-Trinity client extremely efficient. It can run on consumer-grade hardware and resource-constrained devices, as the Aurora module consumes about 0.31 MB of RAM and 1 MB of storage at runtime.
Wattana Viriyasitavat, Li Da Xu, Assadaporn Sapsomboon, Gaurav Dhiman · 5 authors
The advancement of hardware, software, and Internet infrastructure leads to the increasing quantities of smart Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Meanwhile, security issues have increasingly brought to us the concerns due to the evolving IoT scope and mass communications. Trusting service vendors depends on their devices that generate information and provide executions. Blockchain becomes an attractive choice, as evidenced by its wide adoptions. However, trusting IoT-based services becomes an important issue since the implementation of Blockchain-based IoT (BIoT) services is proprietary and independent. This paper introduces a generic architecture design that incorporates Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to establish trust of BIoT services. This can potentially solve the trust problem and based on our experiment it can be scaled well. We also demonstrate how specification languages can be useful to express requirements. It decouples users from Blockchain and thus they can specify qualities of BIoT services without deep knowledge to work with Blockchain.
C. P. Igiri, Deepshikha Bhargava, Collins Udanor, A. R. Sowah
Without the Internet of Things (IoT), there is no smart home, smart city or smart system. It is at the vanguard of the industrial revolution. Engineers need a proper understanding of its architecture to design an optimal system. This chapter presents a comparative analogy on the best architecture for IoT implementation. It seeks to review contemporary IoT architectures and analyse their drawbacks. A critical review of blockchain, IOTA and IoT architecture is done. The study reveals the underlying architecture of low-constrained IoT devices. The IoT devices require a specialized protocol for seamless communication within the network. A review of the consensus protocol and data structure of the two distributed ledger technologies (blockchain and IOTA) enlist IOTA as a relatively better alternative for the low-constrained IoT devices. On this premise, the chapter presents a promising IOTA Tangle as a possible better solution for IoT implementation.
N Sasikala, B. Meenakshi Sundaram, Sougata Biswas, A Sai Nikhil · 5 authors
In recent years, Websites and Web applications have been playing a significant role in everyday life. In the past decade, the number of websites progressed from three million to more than 1.7 billion. The majority of contributions to this number are produced by CMS (content management systems). Current content delivery and management services has many issues in securing data, and are vulnerable to cyberthreats. Hence, one of the methods to create apps transparent and flexible is by implementing Deoentralized applications (Dapps). This paper describes the major security issues of cms and propose an efficient scheme to build a cms dapp on the most familiar blockchain platform-Ethereum. The main Blockchain has 2 categories: partially DApp and fully DApp for the software architectures in DApps. The full and partial Dapps have their own advantages and disadvantages. Here in this paper, a software architecture for full and partial DApp focusing on simulating asset transactions for comparing both the DApps efficiency has been proposed.
Video conferencing applications help people communicate via the Internet and provide a significant and consistent basis for virtual meetings. However, integrity, security, identification, and authentication problems are still universal. Current video conference technologies typically rely on cloud systems to provide a stable and secure basis for executing tasks and processes. At the same time, video conferencing applications are being migrated from centralized to decentralized solutions for better performance without the need for third-party interactions. This article demonstrates a decentralized smart identification scheme for video conferencing applications based on biometric technology, machine learning, and a decentralized hash table combined with blockchain technology. We store users' information on a distributed hash table and transactional events on the distributed ledger after identifying users by implementing machine learning functions. Furthermore, we leverage distributed ledger technology's immutability and traceability properties and distributed hash table unlimited storage feature to improve the system's storage capacity and immutability by evaluating three possible architectures. The experimental results show that an architecture based on blockchain and distributed hash table has better efficiency but needs a longer time to execute than the two other architectures using a centralized database.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In this study, we proposed an architecture for Web 3.0, which is based on the hashed interactions among user nodes that can transform bilateral trusts into collective time order, which is the major achievement of blockchain technology, without the expensive Proof of Work or the questionable Proof of Stake.
Abdelzahir Abdelmaboud, Abdelmuttlib Ibrahim Abdalla Ahmed, Mohammed Abaker, Taiseer Abdalla Elfadil Eisa · 7 authors
The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a popular computing technology paradigm. It is increasingly being utilized to facilitate human life processes through a variety of applications, including smart healthcare, smart grids, smart finance, and smart cities. Scalability, interoperability, security, and privacy, as well as trustworthiness, are all issues that IoT applications face. Blockchain solutions have recently been created to help overcome these difficulties. The purpose of this paper is to provide a survey and tutorial on the use of blockchain in IoT systems. The importance of blockchain technology in terms of features and benefits for constituents of IoT applications is discussed. We propose a blockchain taxonomy for IoT applications based on the most significant factors. In addition, we examine the most widely used blockchain platforms for IoT applications. Furthermore, we discuss how blockchain technology can be used to broaden the spectrum of IoT applications. Besides, we discuss the recent advances and solutions offered for IoT environments. Finally, we discuss the challenges and future research directions of the use of blockchain for the IoT.
With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) , a large-scale, heterogeneous, and dynamic distributed network has been formed among IoT devices. There is an extreme need to establish a trust mechanism between devices, and blockchain can provide a zero-trust security framework for IoT. However, the efficiency of the blockchain is far from meeting the application requirements of the IoT, which has become the biggest resistance to the application of the blockchain in the IoT. Therefore, this paper combines sharding to build an effective Blockchain-based IoT data storage scheme (S-BDS) . Sharding can solve the problem of blockchain capacity and scalability. While the blockchain provides data immutability and traceability for the IoT, it also brings huge demands for data credibility verification. The communication delay in the IoT system seriously affects the security of the system, while the Merkle proof of traditional blockchain occupies a lot of communication resources. This paper constructs Insertable Vector Commitment (IVC) in the bilinear group and replaces the Merkle tree with IVC to store IoT data in the blockchain. The construct has small-sized proof. It also has the ability to record the number of updates, which can prevent replay-attacks. Experiments show that each block processes 1,000 transactions, the proof size of a single data piece is 30% of the original scheme, and proofs from different shards can be aggregated. IVC can effectively reduce communication congestion and improve the stability and security of the IoT system.
An increased pattern of hidden Internet of Things (IoT) devices has been observed. Due to the increased number of security attacks, a large number of IoT devices are disappearing from the public internet. Operating blockchain operations in such ad hoc connectivity becomes challenging. However, multiple past studies have pointed towards IOTA Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) that closely caters to offline blockchain use cases. However, there has been little to no empirical study or introduction to time bounds on transaction confirmation. Therefore, this study explains what provisions the existing IOTA blockchain has to accommodate the increased pattern of hidden IoT devices, and if IOTA is truly sufficient as a solution. In summary, we approach research questions by analyzing the studies that explore the trend of offline IoT devices and evaluating the relevance of offline blockchains, assessing the IOTA specification and codebase around offline transaction-making capabilities and pointing out some bounds that IOTA blockchain nodes must follow towards incoming transactions. Furthermore, we confirm by experimental runs that outside and within the tight time bounds transactions in offline Tangle can become stale and not get confirmed, and the effective time-bound can be even less. Realizing the need for a better offline blockchain scalability solution.