Emanuele Di Pascale, Hamed Ahmadi, Linda Doyle, Irene Macaluso
Neutral Host Small Cell Providers (SCP) represent a key element of the 5G vision of ultra-dense mobile networks. However, current business models mostly focus on multi-year agreements for large venues, such as stadiums and hotel chains. These business agreements are regulated through binding Service Level Agreements (SLAs), which tend to be too cumbersome and costly for smaller scale SCPs. As a result, the neutral host model does not scale up to its full potential. In this paper, we propose a framework to enable the participation of small- to medium-sized players in the cellular market as providers offering network resources to Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). To this purpose, we review the current and emerging spectrum and technology opportunities that SCPs can use for neutral host deployments. We also propose the use of blockchain-enabled smart contracts as a simple and cost-efficient alternative to traditional SLAs for small-scale SCPs. To demonstrate this, we describe a proof of concept implementation of an Ethereum-based smart contract platform for best-effort service between an SCP and an MNO. Our simulations on potential smart contract-based deployments in city centre Dublin show that the received signal strength in the considered area will increase by an average of $10$ percent.
Lodovica Marchesi, Michele Marchesi, Roberto Tonelli, Maria Ilaria Lunesu
Blockchain and the programs running on it, called smart contracts, are increasingly applied in all fields where trust and strong certifications are required. Our work focuses on industrial applications of blockchains and not on cryptocurrencies or tokens. We use frameworks to compare public and permissioned blockchains specifically suited for industrial applications. We also propose a complete solution based on Ethereum to implement a decentralized application, putting together in an original way, components and patterns already used and proven. This solution is characterized by a set of validator nodes running the blockchain using Proof-of-Authority or similar efficient consensus algorithms, by the use of an explorer enabling users to check the blockchain state, and the source code of the smart contracts running on it. From time to time, the hash digest of the last mined block is written into a public blockchain to guarantee immutability. The right to send transactions is granted by validator nodes to users by endowing them with the Ethers mined locally. Overall, the proposed approach has the same transparency and immutability as a public blockchain, largely reducing its drawbacks.
Suat Mercan, Mumin Cebe, Ege Tekiner, Kemal Akkaya ¡ 6 authors
IoT devices have been adopted widely in the last decade which enabled collection of various data from different environments. The collected data is crucial in certain applications where IoT devices generate data for critical infrastructure or systems whose failure may result in catastrophic results. Specifically, for such critical applications, data storage poses challenges since the data may be compromised during the storage and the integrity might be violated without being noticed. In such cases, integrity and data provenance are required in order to be able to detect the source of any incident and prove it in legal cases if there is a dispute with the involved parties. To address these issues, blockchain provides excellent opportunities since it can protect the integrity of the data thanks to its distributed structure. However, it comes with certain costs as storing huge amount of data in a public blockchain will come with significant transaction fees. In this paper, we propose a highly cost effective and reliable digital forensics framework by exploiting multiple inexpensive blockchain networks as a temporary storage before the data is committed to Ethereum. To reduce Ethereum costs,we utilize Merkle trees which hierarchically stores hashes of the collected event data from IoT devices. We evaluated the approach on popular blockchains such as EOS, Stellar, and Ethereum by presenting a cost and security analysis. The results indicate that we can achieve significant cost savings without compromising the integrity of the data.
With the increasing of digitization and massive adoption of advanced technologies in the various industries such as automotive, food, electronic goods etc. not only transform the equipment manufacturerâs operating mode, but also changing the business models. In particular textile industry, the raw materials are collected from different other industries, end products are manufactured, distributed and sold globally. Supply chain and logistics, in particular, are considered as fertile ground for a blockchain implementation due to the several parties involved in the logistic processes and the lack of trust that usually characterize the industry. In this paper, we addressed the automatic textile industry supply chain as case study, in which we present a non â destructive way of ensuring the traceability of different operational modes of supply chain. We have implemented automatic block chain-based framework, which helps track and trace every mode of operation in supply chain. The proposed framework is simulated in Ethereum platform and the result shows the proof â of â concept of proposed model that can be used for wide range of future smart applications.
Emanuele Di Pascale, Hamed Ahmadi, Linda Doyle, Irene Macaluso
Neutral Host Small Cell Providers (SCP) represent a key element of the 5G\nvision of ultra-dense mobile networks. However, current business models mostly\nfocus on multi-year agreements for large venues, such as stadiums and hotel\nchains. These business agreements are regulated through binding Service Level\nAgreements (SLAs), which tend to be too cumbersome and costly for smaller scale\nSCPs. As a result, the neutral host model does not scale up to its full\npotential. In this paper, we propose a framework to enable the participation of\nsmall- to medium-sized players in the cellular market as providers offering\nnetwork resources to Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). To this purpose, we\nreview the current and emerging spectrum and technology opportunities that SCPs\ncan use for neutral host deployments. We also propose the use of\nblockchain-enabled smart contracts as a simple and cost-efficient alternative\nto traditional SLAs for small-scale SCPs. To demonstrate this, we describe a\nproof of concept implementation of an Ethereum-based smart contract platform\nfor best-effort service between an SCP and an MNO. Our simulations on potential\nsmart contract-based deployments in city centre Dublin show that the received\nsignal strength in the considered area will increase by an average of $10$\npercent.\n
There are hundreds of technologies today. Companies and brands continuously try to create and bring something innovative in the market to attract consumers to them in order to get a rise in market share. In the world where people have started getting used to hundreds of technologies, if asked about those which have affected them the most in last ten to twelve years, no one will miss mentioning blockchain. Blockchain has gained very much popularity after the introduction of bitcoin and ethereum in its environment. Blockchain mainly has two types of functionalities. One that involves transactions and the other which talks about contracts. This work highlights some of the very much talked about applications of this technology in the real world. The work also considers various factors and methods by which this technology can be introduced to the audience by suggesting ways in which blockchain can be introduced in the lives. Discussion on how this technology can affect human lives in the future is also an important part of this paper. Because blockchain has huge number of applications that the paper has tried to inculcate, it can be a technology of future which many scientists and industrialists have already started to believe. That is why this work finds a unique and all in one collection of applications and possibilities of Blockchain.
Generally, to make a campaign,startup, or any innovative idea successful requires some amount of donation. Fundraising or let us say Crowdfunding is an efficient way to raise money for your ideas, campaigns, startups etc. There are a lot of platforms available online and they provide space for setting up your own campaign so that you can gets funds for your campaign. people can go and contribute to any idea they like and get benefit from the pledge that you make. Certainly, there are lot of drawbacks to this model. There is no transparency and no assurance that your money is being put to the right use, there are charges to use the platform and many other issues. We try to over come these issues by making a fundraising platform using smart contract in solidity. This will be more secure as it uses Ethereum blockchain to make all the transactions and all the transactions are ethereum based. Not only this but the contributors have the right to vote for a transaction and only when a minimum consensus is achieved the requested transaction can be made.Contributors can have their own pool of contributors which can be achieved by multi-signature wallet.By creating a multisigned wallet , there will be two factor authentication mechanism to access funds, which are related more to security concerns. This not only enables a transparent transaction but also develops trust in the users of the platform. This not only resolves major drawbacks faced in the current live non blockchain based platforms like Kickstarter but also brings in more efficient platform to serve the purpose.â
SHA256 algorithm was one of the reasons people thought that led to professional mining machines and mining pools, since this algorithm could be easily computed. The success of Litecoin induced a variety of algorithmic innovations. Between 2012 and 2014, algorithmic innovation has always been a hot topic in community discussions, and every currency that uses innovative algorithms can make a new wave. Ethereumâs Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm is called Ethash, which is slightly different from Bitcoinâs PoW algorithm, which makes it possible to mine with ordinary hardware. Tendermint consists of two main technologies: the blockchain consensus engine and a common application interface. One of the most important parts of Casperâs proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus is checkpoints. The chapter discusses the three main PoS protocols that use PoS in cryptocurrencies: Casper the Friendly Ghost (CTFG), Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget and Tendermint. CTFG is a correct construction consensus agreement designed to combat the real environment of oligopoly.
Although almost all information about Smart Contract addresses is shared via websites, emails, or other forms of digital communication, Blockchains and distributed ledger technology are unable to establish secure bindings between websites and corresponding Smart Contracts. For a user, it is impossible to differentiate whether a website links to a legitimate Smart Contract set up by owners of a business or to an illicit contract aiming to steal users' funds. Surprisingly, current attempts to solve this issue mostly comprise of information redundancy, e.g., displaying contract addresses multiple times in varying forms of images and texts. These processes are burdensome, as the user is responsible for verifying the correctness of an address. More importantly, they do not address the core issue, as the contract itself does not contain information about its authenticity. To solve current issues for these applications and increase security, we propose a solution that facilitates publicly issued SSL/TLS-certificates of Fully-Qualified Domain Names (FQDN) to ensure the authenticity of Smart Contracts and their owners. Our approach combines on-chain identity assertion utilizing signatures from the respective certificate and off-chain authentication of the Smart Contract stored on the Blockchain. This approach allows to tackle the aforementioned issue and further enables applications such as the identification of consortia members in permissioned networks. The system is open and transparent, as the only requirement for usage is ownership of an SSL/TLS-certificate. To enable privacy-preserving authenticated Smart Contracts, we allow one-way and two-way binding between website and contract. Further, low creation and maintenance costs, a widely accepted public key infrastructure and user empowerment will drive potential adaption of Ethereum Authenticated Smart Contracts (AuthSC).
Nurkhodzha Akbulaev, Ilkin Mammadov, Mehbube Hemdullayeva
This article deals with the theory and practical analysis of the relationship between bitcoin and ethereum cryptocurrencies. The existing developments on this issue are investigated by generalizing the literature on the basic characteristics and relationship of bitcoin and ethereum prices. Based on the problems and existing research on the topic, the analysis of the relationship between ethereum and bitcoin prices is defined as the goal of the article. A mathematical model of the cryptocurrency relationship analysis is presented, which helps to establish that the relationship is quite close. The main result is the conclusion that a connection exists between the prices of bitcoin and ethereum, and this connection can be used for diversification and risk insurance when trading on the cryptocurrency exchange. The purpose of this article is to identify a tool that can describe the relationship between the price of ethereum and both its volume and the price of bitcoin and can predict their changes over time. This article analyzes the price of ethereum as dependent on the price of bitcoin. <b>TOPICS:</b>Currency, performance-measurement, portfolio construction, statistical methods <b>Key Findings</b> ⢠The relationship between the price of ethereum and its volume and the price of bitcoin, as well as the ability to predict their change over time is analyzed. ⢠The revealed multiple regression equation can be used to create operational analytical programs capable of real-time forecasting the price movement of ethereum.
Both in the design and deployment of blockchain solutions many performance-impacting configuration choices need to be made. We introduce BlockSim, a framework and software tool to build and simulate discrete-event dynamic systems models for blockchain systems. BlockSim is designed to support the analysis of a large variety of blockchains and blockchain deployments as well as a wide set of analysis questions. At the core of BlockSim is a Base Model, which contains the main model constructs common across various blockchain systems organized in three abstraction layers (network, consensus and incentives layer). The Base Model is usable for a wide variety of blockchain systems and can be extended easily to include system or deployment particulars. The BlockSim software tool provides a simulator that implements the Base Model in Python. This paper describes the Base Model, the simulator implementation, and the application of BlockSim to Bitcoin, Ethereum and other consensus algorithms. We validate BlockSim simulation results by comparison with performance results from actual systems and from other studies in the literature. We close the paper by a BlockSim simulation study of the impact of uncle blocks rewards on mining decentralization, for a variety of blockchain configurations.
Ever since the concept of parallel processing and remote computation became feasible, Cloud computing is at its highest peak in its popularity. Although cloud computing is effective and feasible in its usage, using the cloud for frequent operations may not be the be the most optimal solution. Hence the concept of FOG proves to be more optimal and efficient. In this paper, we propose a solution by improving the FOG computing concept of decentralization by implementing a secure distributed files system utilizing the IPFS and the Ethereum Blockchain technology. Our proposed system has proved to be efficient by successfully distributing the data in a Raspberry Pi network. The outcome of this work will assist FOG architects in implementing this system in their infrastructure and also prove to be effective for IoT developers in implementing a Raspberry Pi decentralized network while providing more security to the data.
Smart contract is a decentralized application that operates on a blockchain platform, providing secure and reliable capabilities to contract participants. Smart contracts play an important role in decentralized application scenarios. They are widely used in many fields, such as equity crowdfunding, games, insurance, and the Internet of Things, making them attractive to attackers. Compared to traditional programs, the security of smart contracts affects not only the fairness of contracts but also the safety of high volume digital assets on the blockchain managed by contracts. Therefore, analyzing the security of smart contracts and associated vulnerabilities is crucial. In this paper, we analyzed the characteristics of smart contracts and new security risks they bring. We propose a three-layer threat model, i.e., threats from high-level languages, virtual machines, and the blockchain, for characterizing smart contract security. We use the worldâ˛s largest smart contract platform Ethereum as an example to illustrate 15 types of common vulnerabilities in smart contracts. We then summarize the main challenges and progress of smart contract security research on vulnerability, including automated vulnerability detection, automated exploit generation and mitigations for smart contracts. At the end of this paper, we highlight the future of smart contract security research, and proposed two potential research directions.
Maher Alharby, Roben Castagna Lunardi, Amjad Aldweesh, Aad van Moorsel
In proof-of-work based blockchains such as Ethereum, verification of blocks is an integral part of establishing consensus across nodes. However, in Ethereum, miners do not receive a reward for verifying. This implies that miners face the Verifier's Dilemma: use resources for verification, or use them for the more lucrative mining of new blocks? We provide an extensive analysis of the Verifier's Dilemma, using a data-driven model-based approach that combines closed-form expressions, machine learning techniques and discrete-event simulation. We collect data from over 300,000 smart contracts and experimentally obtain their CPU execution times. Gaussian Mixture Models and Random Forest Regression transform the data into distributions and inputs suitable for the simulator. We show that, indeed, it is often economically rational not to verify, in particular for miners with less hashing power. We consider two approaches to mitigate the implications of the Verifier's Dilemma, namely parallelization and active insertion of invalid blocks, both will be shown to be effective.
Petrônio Cândido de Lima e Silva, Carlos Alberto Severiano, Marcos Antônio Alves, Rodrigo Silva ¡ 6 authors
In this paper we introduce a Non-Stationary Fuzzy Time Series (NSFTS) method with time varying parameters adapted from the distribution of the data. In this approach, we employ Non-Stationary Fuzzy Sets, in which perturbation functions are used to adapt the membership function parameters in the knowledge base in response to statistical changes in the time series. The proposed method is capable of dynamically adapting its fuzzy sets to reflect the changes in the stochastic process based on the residual errors, without the need to retraining the model. This method can handle non-stationary and heteroskedastic data as well as scenarios with concept-drift. The proposed approach allows the model to be trained only once and remain useful long after while keeping reasonable accuracy. The flexibility of the method by means of computational experiments was tested with eight synthetic non-stationary time series data with several kinds of concept drifts, four real market indices (Dow Jones, NASDAQ, SP500 and TAIEX), three real FOREX pairs (EUR-USD, EUR-GBP, GBP-USD), and two real cryptocoins exchange rates (Bitcoin-USD and Ethereum-USD). As competitor models the Time Variant fuzzy time series and the Incremental Ensemble were used, these are two of the major approaches for handling non-stationary data sets. Non-parametric tests are employed to check the significance of the results. The proposed method shows resilience to concept drift, by adapting parameters of the model, while preserving the symbolic structure of the knowledge base.
Yuhong Li, Kun Ouyang, Nanxuan Li, Rahim Rahmani ¡ 6 authors
Being able to obtain various environmental and driving data from vehicles is becoming more and more important for current and future intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) to operate efficiently and economically. However, the limitations of privacy protection and security of the current ITSs are hindering users and vehicles from providing data. In this paper, we propose a new ITS architecture by using blockchain technology solving the privacy protection and security problems, and promoting users and vehicles to provide data to ITSs. The proposed architecture uses blockchain as a trust infrastructure to protect users' privacy and provide trustworthy services to users. It is also compatible with the legacy ITS infrastructure and services. In addition, the hierarchical organization of chains enables the scalability of the system, and the use of smart contracts provides a flexible way for introducing new services in the ITS. The proposed architecture is demonstrated by a proof of concept implementation based on Ethereum. The test results show that the proposed architecture is feasible.
Transactions represent a fundamental component in blockchains as they are the primary means for users to change the blockchain state. Current blockchain systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum require users to constantly observe the state changes of interest or the events taking place in a blockchain and requires the user to explicitly release the required transactions to respond to the observed events in the blockchain. This paper proposes EventWarden, a decentralized event-driven proxy service for users to outsource transactions in Ethereum-like blockchains. EventWarden employs a novel combination of smart contracts and blockchain logs. EventWarden allows a user to create a proxy smart contract that specifies an interested event and also reserves an arbitrary transaction to release. Upon observing the occurrence of the prescribed event, anyone in the Blockchain network can call the proxy contract to earn the service fee reserved in the contract by proving to the contract that the event has been recorded into blockchain logs, which then automatically triggers the proxy contract to release the reserved transaction. We show that the reserved transaction can only get released from the proxy contract when the prescribed event has taken place. We also demonstrate that as long as a single member in the Blockchain network is incentivized by the service fee to call the proxy contract after the prescribed event has taken place, the reserved transaction is guaranteed to get released. We implement EventWarden over the Ethereum official test network. The results demonstrate that EventWarden is effective and is ready-to-use in practice.
The electricity industry has always been under scrutiny in order to improve the quality of electricity supply, measurement and billing services to have the at most user transparency, while providing these services with the highest efficiency. Although many solutions have emerged, of which the smart meter was considered a viable option, it was quick to perish under the prodigious complications with the real-life feasibilities. El DApp- An electricity power consumption tracking application solution, harnessing both the IoT and Blockchain utilities to provide a decentralized and secure recording mechanism, that provides an improved architecture to the smart meter is proposed in this article. The El DApp provides a high security and cost efficient decentralized live electricity power consumption recording of the user that is maintained by a Raspberry Pi based Ethereum network.
Piotr Stolarski, WĹodzimierz Lewoniewski, Witold Abramowicz
In this research we presented different approaches to investigate the possible relationships between the largest crowd-based knowledge source and the market potential of particular cryptocurrencies. Identification of such relations is crucial because their existence may be used to create a broad spectrum of analyses and reports about cryptocurrency projects and to obtain a comprehensive outlook of the blockchain domain. The activities on the blockchain reach different levels of anonymity which renders them hard objects of studies. In particular, the standard tools used to characterize social trends and variables that describe cryptocurrenciesâ situations are unsuitable to be used in the environment that extensively employs cryptographic techniques to hide real users. The employment of Wikipedia to trace crypto assets value need examination because the portal allows gathering of different opinionsâcontent of the articles is edited by a group of people. Consequently, the information can be more attractive and useful for the readers than in case of non-collaborative sources of information. Wikipedia Articles often appears in the premium position of such search engines as Google, Bing, Yahoo and others. One may expect different demand on information about particular cryptocurrency depending on the different events (e.g., sharp fluctuations of price). Wikipedia offers only information about cryptocurrencies that are important from the point of view of language community of the users in Wikipedia. This âfilterâ helps to better identify those cryptocurrencies that have a significant influence on the regional markets. The models encompass linkages between different variables and properties. In one model cryptocurrency projects are ranked with the means of articles sentiment and quality. In another model, Wikipedia visits are linked to cryptocurrenciesâ popularity. Additionally, the interactions between information demand in different Wikipedia language versions are elaborated. They are used to assess the geographical esteem of certain crypto coins. The information about the legal status of cryptocurrency technologies in different states that are offered by Wikipedia is used in another proposed model. It allows assessment of the adoption of cryptocurrencies in a given legislature. Finally, a model is developed that joins Wikipedia articles editions and deletions with the social sentiment towards particular cryptocurrency projects. The mentioned analytical purposes that permit assessment of the popularity of blockchain technologies in different local communities are not the only results of the paper. The models can show which country has the biggest demand on particular cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Monero, Litecoin, Dogecoin and others.
Roy Cerqueti, Massimiliano Giacalone, Raffaele Mattera
Recently, cryptocurrencies have attracted a growing interest from investors,\npractitioners and researchers. Nevertheless, few studies have focused on the\npredictability of them. In this paper we propose a new and comprehensive study\nabout cryptocurrency market, evaluating the forecasting performance for three\nof the most important cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin) in\nterms of market capitalization. At this aim, we consider non-Gaussian GARCH\nvolatility models, which form a class of stochastic recursive systems commonly\nadopted for financial predictions. Results show that the best specification and\nforecasting accuracy are achieved under the Skewed Generalized Error\nDistribution when Bitcoin/USD and Litecoin/USD exchange rates are considered,\nwhile the best performances are obtained for skewed Distribution in the case of\nEthereum/USD exchange rate. The obtain findings state the effectiveness -- in\nterms of prediction performance -- of relaxing the normality assumption and\nconsidering skewed distributions.\n
Recent development of electronic voting (e-voting) systems has been focusing on blockchain-based design [4]. Despite blockchainâs advantages in public verifiability, existing blockchain-based voting systems are impractical due to the high block time and transaction costs of the underlying blockchain. To achieve verifiability and efficiency simultaneously, we propose Hybrid-Voting, a hybrid structured e-voting system that combines an untrusted centralized server with smart contracts on Ethereum blockchain. In addition, voter anonymity and privacy are guaranteed by using short linkable ring signature and ElGamal encryption. Our evaluation shows that Hybrid-Voting can support 10k voters by using one commodity computer, and the cost per voter is less than one US dollar, much lower than the cost per voter in todayâs elections [1].