Ãœmit Cali, Ugur Halden, Marthe Fogstad Dynge, Aleksandra-Sasa Bukvic-Schaefer
Driven by techno-economic and climate change concerns, the energy sector is becoming more decentralized and decarbonized. With the increased deployment of intermittent energy sources such as photovoltaics, the need for energy storage is increasing. However, high costs still create a barrier for investing in such options. In this study, the Levelized Cost of Storage for residential scale Lithium-Ion battery is evaluated by comparing traditional and novel financing options such as blockchain-enabled crowdfunding. The proposed Financial Technology tool can allow multiple smaller stakeholders to offer loans with longer dept tenors and lower interests which will allow digital partial ownership of such investments and provide extra incentives for rapid deployment of energy storage solutions. The findings illustrate the economic viability of energy storage systems entering the European energy sector and highlight how blockchain-based FinTech tools can further accelerate the deployment of energy storage systems through energy financing.
Tanmayee Deshprabhu, Justin P. Coon, Mihai-Alin Badiu
This paper addresses the need for a secure data management framework for lightweight Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Existing approaches rely on capable nodes or external cloud technology to carry out key functions for the lightweight IoT nodes, such as data processing, storage or routing. Instead, this paper considers a fully lightweight network or an existing network where the more capable nodes have failed. We propose a novel data management framework using a lightweight distributed ledger for IoT networks. This includes a trust-based data aggregation protocol in which data from untrustworthy nodes is not disregarded, but is instead utilised to strengthen the aggregation result. MATLAB simulations show that the proposed aggregation scheme infers data with high accuracy for both trustworthy and untrustworthy networks. Neutral networks exhibit a higher error rate but the maximum error rate decreases for larger networks.
Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) are based on the Blockchain concept and have been specifically designed for enterprise-level devices with acceptable computing powers and network bandwidth. Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG) ledger(s) is a new form of DLT technology designed for Internet-of- Things (IoT) devices due to the nature of its disadvantages of the computing powers and limited network bandwidth. IOTA is a DAG-based Blockchain implementation for IoT applications that has gained an increased attention in recent years. One of the major concerns that is hindering for its wide adaptation is the security concerns. Many security attack occurrences against the IOTA such as parasite attacks, double spending, and DDoS to disrupt availability resources of the new ledger can become both widespread and disruptive. Existing security studies are ad-hoc and typically address a solution scheme for a specific security threat. In this paper, we present an adaptive Reinforcement-Learning (RL) approach to best classify the monitored resource consumption parameters of the DAG-based nodes or devices for any potential security anomaly detection. The aim is to create high accuracy security threat index that can be used to proactively defend the decentralized IOTA infrastructure and individual nodes against compromises. The performance evaluation results of this solution against DoS attacks are promising. The framework implementation derives a stochastic interpretation and output and the same time it converges deterministically.
Xiaoge Huang, Yongsheng Wang, Qianbin Chen, Jie Zhang
Blockchain technology is used to improve the security of users data in the network. However, the traditional blockchain structure is not suitable for the fog network due to the low throughput and scalability limitations. To solve the above issues, in this paper, we propose a sharding blockchain to improve the security of the fog network, while increasing the throughput. Sharding blockchain will divide the network into several shards, and each of them could process the transactions parallelly. In addition, the normalized entropy of the fog network could be calculated by the main opinion and secondary opinion in the consensus result. Then, the main-chain layer could calculate the probability of malicious fog nodes (FN) in the network and the maximum number of shards. Finally, the S-type fog nodes assignment algorithm (S-NA) is proposed to optimize the association between shards and FNs, which combines the greedy algorithm and the max-min fair algorithm. Simulation results verify the efficiency of the proposed S-NA algorithm.
With the recent rise in the cost of transactions on blockchain platforms, there is a need to explore other service models that may provide a more predictable cost to customers and end-users. We discuss the Contract Service Provider (CSP) model as a counterpart of the successful Internet Service Provider (ISP) model. Similar to the ISP business model based on peered routing-networks, the CSP business model is based on multiple CSP entities forming a CSP Community or group offering a contract service for specific types of virtual assets. We discuss the contract domain construct which encapsulates well-defined smart contract primitives, policies and contract-ledger. We offer a number of design principles borrowed from the design principles of the Internet architecture.
This paper presents a simple and self-adjusting blockchain protocol called ORIC to make full use of the available bandwidth as far as possible. ORIC follows the Nakamoto protocol and allows many more blocks to be produced during the block-time so that the bandwidth can be exploited to its maximum extent. Recorded blocks are organized into a Directed Acyclic Graph(DAG) sequence from which a transaction total order can be deterministically derived as the blockchain ledger. We give a theoretical analysis of ORIC’s properties, such as security and liveness, and evaluate its performance on a distributed system simulator with 1000 full nodes designed. The simulation shows that ORIC can achieve bandwidth utilization close to 50% while confirming transactions in 5-7 minutes under the bandwidth of 20Mbps available. More importantly, our protocol can achieve an optimal throughput by a self-adjusting mechanism when the available bandwidth changes in a peer-to-peer network while hardly affecting security.
Andreas Heider-Aviet, Danny Roswin Ollik, Stefano Berlato, Silvio Ranise · 9 authors
Providing seamless connectivity and services across national borders are intricate challenges with multifarious underlying aspects, ranging from the network management to business and political considerations. Since the cross-border inter-Public Land Mobile Network (PLMN) network handover is currently not available in European cellular networks, we present a complementary approach, diminishing the connectivity gap to a minimum. By leveraging Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), we establish a dynamic, secure data exchange and management solution between several Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) of different countries. Systematically integrating foreign cell and base station parameter (i.e., Radio Access Network (RAN) data) of border regions into the internal network management systems permits their usage in standardized Mobility Management procedures. We demonstrate that this type of collaboration on the inter-MNO network governance considerably improves the network quality and customer experience when crossing national borders. Since foreign RAN data is also required for the inter-PLMN network handover (and can serve many additional purposes) and provided that our solution is not relying on any specific mobile network technology generation (e.g., 4G or 5G), we conclude that it is a fundamental step towards an inter-MNO ecosystem beyond 5G.
Mikhail Komarov, Markova Margarita, Aleksandr Ometov
Today, the evolution of electrical grid systems is pacing towards interconnected Smart Grids mainly driven by governmental activities worldwide. This step brings additional challenges from the data storage perspective since conventional centralized systems may not handle the growing data volumes arriving from various sources. Thus, new distributed solutions must be introduced to allow flexible and on-the-fly enablers to such tremendous data flows. One of the potential candidates is integrating Blockchain-powered Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to achieve an immutable record of manipulating electricity from production to end-user delivery. In this paper, we study the relation of said diverse technological components inter-operation, related challenges, and solutions proposed by research and federal regulators. Based on the literature review, we draft the recommendation for the wide-scale architecture of the future combined solution.
Nitin Gupta, Jagdeep Singh, Sanjay Kumar Dhurandher, Zhu Han
Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 enable interconnection among various devices. An opportunistic IoT network is an ad hoc network that is formed by the nodes (e.g., smart vehicles and mobile phones) by utilizing various short radio range techniques. In this kind of network, information forwarding and dissemination among other smart devices is based upon the opportunistic contact nature mainly due to network dynamics and user mobility. Routing plays an important part in these kinds of networks since there does not exist a pre-established route (Tyagi and Kumar, 2013). Nodes are often selected dynamically based upon many parameters such that messages can be delivered successfully to the destination devices or sinks. However, these intermediate nodes are often selfish because routing these packets costs energy. In the case of incomplete cooperation and asymmetric information, message delivery can be severely degraded, which increases the network delay affecting the overall network performance. Therefore, this work proposes an incentive design mechanism based on the contract theory to reward intermediate nodes appropriately to forward the messages. The contract theory is used to model the forwarding-forwarder node interaction as a labor market with private information. First, the users are classified into a finite number of types according to their ability of forwarding the message, and the service trading between the forwarding and forwarder nodes is properly modeled. Furthermore, the necessary and sufficient conditions are derived to provide the incentives to the nodes involved in the message forwarding. Extensive simulations show that the proposed mechanism is effective in providing incentives and outperforms other benchmark schemes in terms of delivery probability, average latency, and overhead ratio.
Large-scale deployment of renewable energy sources brings new challenges for smart grid management requiring the development of decentralized solutions and active participation of prosumer and non-grid-owned assets. Local energy flexibility markets can help in monitoring energy flows, motivate changes in prosumers’ energy supply and demand, achieving local energy balance, and optimization of electricity flows. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based decentralized energy flexibility market enabling small-scale prosumers to trade in a peer-to-peer fashion their flexibility in terms of load modulation concerning the baseline energy profiles. We have defined an energy flexibility token for digitizing the flexibility of prosumers allowing to be traded on the market as an asset and self-enforcing smart contracts for decentralized market operation including functions such as the placement of flexibility bids/offers, trading session management, or energy and financial settlement of energy flexibility transactions. For matching the flexibility bids and offers, a solution based on a greedy heuristic and a bipartite graph is proposed for minimizing the number of flexibility transactions and reducing the blockchain-associated costs, while Oracles are used to assure its secure integration with the blockchain. The blockchain-based flexibility market was validated with the help of the Terni city Distribution System Operator, showing promising results in enabling the self-consumption of renewable energy generated in a small scale urban micro-grid considering live energy monitoring data, and in assuring the local balancing of the demand side in a simulated environment considering many market participants and historical energy data.
The growing web of data warrants better data management strategies. Data silos are single points of failure and they face availability problems which lead to broken links. Furthermore the dynamic nature of some datasets increases the need for a versioning scheme. In this work, we propose a novel architecture for a linked open data infrastructure, built on open decentralized technologies. IPFS is used for storage and retrieval of data, and the public Ethereum blockchain is used for naming, versioning and storing metadata of datasets. We furthermore exploit two mechanisms for maintaining a collection of relevant, high-quality datasets in a distributed manner in which participants are incentivized. The platform is shown to have a low barrier to entry and censorship-resistance. It benefits from the fault-tolerance of its underlying technologies. Furthermore, we validate the approach by implementing our solution.
Blockchain is starting to be deployed in the Internet of Things (IoT) to enable autonomous device-to-device transactions. However, traditional block-based blockchain techniques, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, are not suitable for IoT environments due to their low throughput, high computation overhead, and costly transaction fee. To satisfy the requirements of IoT environments, directed-acyclic-graph (DAG)-based approaches, aiming to provide cheap blockchain services with low latency and high throughput, are emerging. This article presents a set of comprehensive experimental studies on IOTA, a representative DAG-based blockchain. We aim to exhibit its unique characteristics mainly from three aspects: 1) performance; 2) security; and 3) system robustness. We have developed a series of benchmark tools and judiciously selected typical configurations to perform experimental examinations with a real private IOTA network. Our studies reveal several interesting findings: 1) the throughput of IOTA is higher than the traditional block-based blockchain but far less than the reported thousands of transactions per second (TPS) in its whitepaper, even with scaling-up configurations; 2) the database query heavily impacts the performance of IOTA, even more than its mining [i.e., Proof of Work (PoW)] process; and 3) the system robustness of IOTA is closely related to the frequency of the incoming transactions while the milestone sent by the centralized coordinator has little effect on the system robustness. We make our benchmark tools public and expect our works can inspire system architects, application designers, and practitioners with new optimization directions and potential application cases for further exploration.
In the world of information security, BlockChain Technology has gained a lot of importance in the recent past as it uses hashing algorithms like MD 5 and SHA thereby enabling that the contents of the block are secure and immutable. In the current research paper effort has been made to exploit the Smart contract feature of BlockChain technology. A new state of the art Smart Contract System between the Customer, Car Dealer and Car Manufacturer has been designed, developed and deployed. This would ensure that seamless financial transactions can be executed amongst all the three parties as on the receipt of timely payment from the customer, the Car manufacturer can deliver the vehicle in a hassle free manner.
With the proliferation of smart grid and deregulation of the energy market, a wide variety of peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading systems have emerged. Common challenges for designing such systems include prosumers’ privacy and security threats. To this end, Blockchain-based solutions have gained a lot of attention, though most existing solutions have either employed permissionless blockchain, which is far from pragmatic for a P2P energy trading system with peers permitted to join or leave the network at their whim; or relatively secure yet inefficient permissioned blockchains. Hence, this article presents a flexible permissioned ascription (FPA) scheme that uses on-chain and off-chain permissioning scheme viaOrionandMetamaskwallet. It also employs contract permissioning through a JavaScript based chain code deployed over Hyperledger Besu (an Ethereum based permissioned Blockchain network) with istanbul byzantine fault tolerant (IBFT) 2.0 consensus algorithm. Additionally, the proposed framework is emulated for development of a working prototype for a P2P energy trading system. Its performance evaluation has been conducted and monitored with Grafana, Prometheus, Hyperledger Caliper, and Kibana for parameters such as latency, throughput, success rate, CPU time, block time, block behind time, memory usage, garbage collection (GC) time, and performance of the validator nodes. The latency of IBFT 2.0 was found five times lesser than that of Ethereum and two times lesser than HF RAFT and KAFKA under varying conditions. Also, the measured throughput was 1.5 times higher than RAFT and Kafka and three times higher than that of Ethereum. The average block confirmation time measured is 5–6 s. The GC usage measured very less, i.e., 0.5–0.8%, with the proposed framework. It has been observed that the proposed energy-trading framework provides an efficient performance for deploying, transferring, and querying the energy transaction to a P2P energy-trading Blockchain network when compared with other consensus mechanisms.
Blockchain-based Internet of Things (BC-IoT) brings the advantages of blockchain into traditional IoT systems. In BC-IoT, the smart contract has been widely used for automatic, trusted, and decentralized applications. Smart contracts require frequent adjust and fast update due to various reasons, such as inevitable code bugs, changes of applications, or security requirements. However, previous smart contract architecture and updating mechanism are low speed and cause high overhead, because they are based on recompilation and redeployment in BC-IoT. Meanwhile, smart contract execution is so time consuming due to contract instruction dispatching and operand loading in the stack-based Ethereum virtual machine (EVM). To address these issues, we propose a new smart contract architecture and optimization mechanism for BC-IoTs, ATOM, which provides architectural supports to update contract economically and fast executing in instructionwise for the first time, to the best of our knowledge. We design a compact Application-oriented Instruction (AoI) set to describe application operations. We can construct the bytecode of smart contract from application by directly assembling templates prebuilt upon the AoIs rather than by compilation. We also present an optimized mechanism for AoI execution to enable access addressable storage place rather than the indirect access through stack. We perform ATOM on a BC-IoT testbed based on private Ethereum and Hyperledger Burrow. The experimental results highlight that ATOM is more efficient than state-of-the-art approaches. ATOM can reduce update latency by 62.7%, ledger size by 70%, and gas usage by 90% on average, respectively. Compared with the traditional smart contract architecture, ATOM can improve EVM Memory access efficiency significantly by up to$10\times $and achieve improvement of execution efficiency with up to$1.6\times $.
Kemal Turksonmez, Marcin Furtak, Mike P. Wittie, David L. Millman
Blockchain transactions compete for limited space in blockchain blocks. Miners prefer to include transactions with higher fees into new blocks. In the context of Ethereum, gas price price oracles predict fees such that transactions submitted at those fees make it into a block within a target delay. In practice, however, oracles are not accurate, which makes it difficult for distributed applications to operate predictable services in terms of price and performance.To understand oracle performance we define a new gas prediction accuracy metric. We demonstrate that oracles underprice transactions, causing them to miss the delay target, as well as overprice transactions, causing them to meet the delay target, but at a higher than necessary cost. We provide comparative analysis of five gas price oracles showing their relative accuracy, transaction accept rates, price stability, and discuss factors that influence oracle accuracy. We observe that the ETHGasStation oracle produces the most accurate and stable price predictions. For users that prefer to run their own oracle Web3.py provides comparable performance.
The core vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) is to connect objects into a broad network and establish interactions between them to enhance society and human life through the society of objects. As this network expands and the number of connected objects increases continuously, more efficient, secure, and scalable architectures will be needed. Social IoT (SIoT) is a promising IoT architecture, which is based on establishing social relationships between objects. However, being centralized is one of its drawbacks, which leads to challenges like scalability, latency, and privacy issues. Distributed ledger technologies, especially blockchain, are distributed architectures that have received attention in recent years. This paper proposes a fully decentralized SIoT-based architecture for the IoT, exploiting a two-layer distributed ledger structure. This architecture is privacy-preserving and scalable; besides, it provides social relationships between objects. These social relationships are stored as transactions on the ledger. This study also calculates the required space to store ledger data locally. The number of established relationships between the objects is estimated by simulation. The results indicate that less than 10% of all possible relationships are based after 1000 days. Hence, it is possible to store ledger data locally. This approach leads to ten times less latency comparing to previous SIoT-based architectures for 10000 devices.
The recently emerging blockchain technology provides a promising tool to enable endogenous security in Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems. However, when applying the legacy blockchain technology to the existing IoT systems, some technical bottlenecks due to resource constraints, such as storage resource, should be carefully addressed. In this article, we propose an optimal blockchain deployment mechanism for wireless IoT systems, where IoT devices have limited resources and the wireless links connection IoT devices are vulnerable, to improve the storage efficiency of massive blockchain data and realize the organic integration of blockchain technology and the communication process. We propose to maintain a complete blockchain by a set of proximity IoT nodes in a collaborative way on the premise of ensuring that each node can check every transaction. Through dynamically adjusting optimal block assignment, the tradeoff between the length of the blockchain to be stored and the security level provided can be well made. Moreover, a chaotic-based genetic algorithm is developed to obtain the near-optimal block assignment solution efficiently. Simulation results show that our proposed blockchain-based mechanism can effectively address the security issue in wireless IoT systems.
Multiplayer computer games can be divided into two architectural groups: client-server and Peer-to-Peer (P2P). While the peer-to-peer approach is very promising due to its independence of expensive game servers, a number of issues, such as state synchronization in an un-trusted environment, arise. Blockchain networks are a special case of a P2P network, and they have the potential to efficiently tackle some issues with P2P-based multiplayer games. However, blockchain development is a vast and complicated area, foreign to most game developers. In this paper, we present a framework to connect an existing game client to a blockchain network, friendly towards game developers. More precisely, we develop a middleware solution and a data model therein, to store the game state on a chain and communicate it to the game client.
Aug 18, 2021·Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
Ethereum is the most popular blockchain platform for the development of blockchain-powered applications (a.k.a, ). Developing a involves translating requests captured in the frontend of an application into contract transactions. However, transactions need to be payed for. Ethereum employs the gas system to charge transaction fees. The gas system has three key components, namely gas price, gas usage, and gas limit. We refer to these components and their interplay as the gas triangle. In this paper, we claim that the inherently complex gas triangle should not be exposed to end-users. We conduct two studies that provide empirical evidence to support our claim. In light of our results, we provide a list of recommendations to novice end-users. We conclude the paper with a list of research challenges that need to be tackled in order to support the development of next-generation that completely hide the gas triangle from end-users.