Somesh Kumar Dewangan, Siddharth Choubey, Abha Choubey, J. P. Patra · 5 authors
The blockchain network was originated from the Internet financial sector as a decentralized, immutable ledger system for transactional data ordering. Nowadays, it is envisioned as a powerful backbone/framework for decentralized data processing and data-driven self-organization in flat, open-access networks. The blockchain is a distributed, decentralized system that maintains a shared state. The blockchain is inefficient and redundant, and, that is by design, it gives us is an extreme level of fault tolerance. In particular, the plausible characteristics of decentralization, immutability, and self-organization are primarily owing to the unique decentralized consensus mechanisms introduced by the blockchain network. In this system, messages may subject to loss, damage, latency, and repetition. Also, the sending order may not necessarily be consistent with the receiving order of messages. The activities of nodes could be arbitrary, they may join and quit the network at any time; they may also dump and falsify information or simply stop working. Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that creates a permanent, sequenced, tamper-resistant, and continuously growing list of records that is linked and secured using cryptography. With blockchain, any system of record can be 266 replicated, shared, and synchronized across multiple locations without the need for a trusted third party for verification or authentication. While all blockchains achieve the aforementioned outcome, the architecture of blockchains depends on the use case and can range from a public permission less to a private permission design. Public blockchains, popularly represented by Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, are often considered to be inherently fault-tolerant by virtue of wide decentralization and methods of achieving consensus.
For a blockchain, consensus is the foundation protocol that enables cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin to maintain state. Additionally, to ensure safety and liveness for a publicly accessible and verifiable ledger, fault tolerance must be robust. However, there appears to be a degree of misunderstanding about how consensus is applied across blockchains. To assist researchers considering variations between them, this study presents a rational classification of consensus methods applied to current blockchains. The study provides a survey of 19 methods classified by the scarce resource they employ: clock-cycles, bits, tokens, votes, time, and biometrics. Blockchain implementations are split between consensus algorithms requiring proof of resource and those that use majority voting to update the ledger.
Muhammad Adnan Khan, Sagheer Abbas, Abdur Rehman, Yousaf Saeed · 8 authors
Realizing secure and private communications on the Internet of Things (IoT) is challenging, primarily due to IoT's projected vast scale and extensive deployment. Recent efforts have explored the use of blockchain in decentralized protection and privacy supported. Such solutions, however, are highly demanding in terms of computation and time requirements, barring these solutions from the majority of IoT applications. Specifically, in this paper, we introduce a resource-efficient, blockchain-based solution for secure and private IoT. The solution is made possible through novel exploitation of computational resources in a typical IoT environment (e.g., smart homes), along with the use of an instance of Deep Extreme Learning Machine (DELM). In this proposed approach, the Smart Home Architecture based in Blockchain is protected by carefully evaluating its reliability in regard to the essential security aims of privacy, integrity, and accessibility. In addition, we present simulation results to emphasize that the overheads created by our method (in terms of distribution, processing time, and energy consumption) are marginal related to their protection and privacy benefits.
Divija Swetha Gadiraju, V. Lalitha, Vaneet Aggarwal
Blockchain is a distributed ledger with wide applications. Due to the\nincreasing storage requirement for blockchains, the computation can be afforded\nby only a few miners. Sharding has been proposed to scale blockchains so that\nstorage and transaction efficiency of the blockchain improves at the cost of\nsecurity guarantee. This paper aims to consider a new protocol,\nSecure-Repair-Blockchain (SRB), which aims to decrease the storage cost at the\nminers. In addition, SRB also decreases the bootstrapping cost, which allows\nfor new miners to easily join a sharded blockchain. In order to reduce storage,\ncoding-theoretic techniques are used in SRB. In order to decrease the amount of\ndata that is transferred to the new node joining a shard, the concept of exact\nrepair secure regenerating codes is used. The proposed blockchain protocol\nachieves lower storage than those that do not use coding, and achieves lower\nbootstrapping cost as compared to the different baselines.\n
Xu Wang, Xuan F. Zha, Guangsheng Yu, Wei Ni · 5 authors
Internet of Things (IoT) technology is digitizing the physical world by connecting enormous and heterogeneous devices and unleashing great economic benefit. However, data privacy, security and trust issues in current solutions are seriously limiting the adoption of IoT applications. Blockchain, a decentralized and tamperresistant ledger, maintains consistent and immutable blocks of data at different servers and has the potential to tackle the security concerns in IoT applications. Inherent features in IoT, such as the massive IoT devices, heterogeneous IoT networks, limited battery, low computing power and communication bandwidth, make it hard to directly adopt blockchain technology in IoT application. This chapter presents a comprehensive survey on existing blockchain and IoT technologies and emphasizes on the challenges and limitation. Current studies, projects and designs on Blockchain-IoT systems are introduced and compared to illustrate the feasibility of the integration of blockchain and IoT. Blockchain technologies that can potentially address the critical challenges in IoT applications and suit the features of the same are identified with potential adaptations and enhancements elaborated on blockchain data structures, key blockchain technologies and consensus protocols. Future research directions of blockchain are collated for effective adoption in IoT applications.
Olamide Jogunola, Mohammad Hammoudeh, Kelvin Anoh, Bamidele Adebisi
The increasing integration of prosumers and smart metering devices into the energy distribution network, is transforming the traditional energy market to a community energy trading that requires peer-to-peer (P2P) interactions. Such P2P interactions result in complex data exchanges among prosumers, utility grid, and market operators. This inevitably introduces control complexity, security, and privacy challenges in the existing power system. The application of distributed ledger technology (DLT) has seen an increase in solving security challenges in the power network, specifically, in P2P energy exchanges. Thus, this study explores different DLT structures including blockchain and IOTA usage in energy P2P trading. A smart contract for managing trust and transactions is designed and implemented on IBM hyperledger fabric platform. In addition, we evaluated the performance of interconnected internet of things devices for energy transactions with IOTA protocol, which uses the directed acyclic graph as its DLT structure, against the Ethereum-based blockchain structure. It is shown that the end-to-end transaction delay with the IOTA DLT is lower than the Ethereum-based DLT implementation.
Blockchain has made an impact on today's technology by revolutionizing the financial industry through utilization of cryptocurrencies using decentralized control. This has been followed by extending Blockchain to span several other industries and applications for its capabilities in verification. With the current trend of pursuing the decentralized Internet, many methods have been proposed to achieve decentralization considering different aspects of the current Internet model ranging from infrastructure and protocols to services and applications. This paper investigates Blockchain's capacities to provide a robust and secure decentralized model for Internet. The paper conducts a critical review on recent Blockchain-based methods capable for the decentralization of the future Internet. We identify and investigate two research aspects of Blockchain that provides high impact in realizing the decentralized Internet with respect to current Internet and Blockchain challenges while keeping various design in considerations. The first aspect is the consensus algorithms that are vital components for decentralization of the Blockchain. We identify three key consensus algorithms including PoP, Paxos, and PoAH that are more adequate for reaching consensus for such tremendous scale Blockchain-enabled architecture for Internet. The second aspect that we investigated is the compliance of Blockchain with various emerging Internet technologies and the impact of Blockchain on those technologies. Such emerging Internet technologies in combinations with Blockchain would help to overcome Blockchain's established flaws in a way to be more optimized, efficient and applicable for Internet decentralization.
Haya R. Hasan, Khaled Salah, Raja Jayaraman, Ibrar Yaqoob · 5 authors
Physical Internet (PI) is a global and interconnected logistics system that enables freight transportation and material handling akin to transfer of data packets in computer networks and digital Internet. Blockchain is an emerging and disruptive technology that has the potential to bring ground-breaking innovation and major improvements to PI based transportation and material handling systems. In this article, we describe the advantages of integrating blockchain technology with PI and present suitable architectures. We discuss the enabling concepts required to ensure the feasibility of blockchain based PI networks leading to efficiency and trust for the next generation logistic networks and material handling systems. Furthermore, we present two permissioned block-chain architectures using Hyperledger Fabric and Besu that provide decentralization, privacy, trust, immutability, and transparency in PI networks. Finally, we highlight several use case scenarios that demonstrate the practicality of the proposed blockchain architectures for the PI networks.
Blockchains have seen a recent rise in popularity as a generic solution for trustless distributed applications across a wide range of industries. However, blockchain protocols have faced scalability issues in applications involving a growing number of participants. In this paper we instantiate and evaluate StakeCube, a proposal for a scalable shard-based distributed ledger. We further detail and tune a byzantine agreement algorithm suited for StakeCube's sharding structure, and we experimentally study and asses its performance, especially regarding scalability. We were successfully able to run StakeCube with up to 5000 participants, confirming up to 1100 bytes/s of transaction, with a confirmation time starting at 200 seconds. Finally, we use StakeCube in a large scale energy marketplace application, and show that a node running on a Raspberry Pi Zero is able to handle the load without issues.
Ability to perform fast analysis on massive public blockchain transaction data is needed in various finance applications such as tracing of fraudulent activities. The blockchain data that is synced as a node is accessible as a sequence of blocks containing transactions. This way of accessing transaction data, however, is too slow for applications that require a transaction graph to be constructed. We develop a cluster based system that constructs a distributed transaction graph in parallel. Since blockchain data is continuously growing, our parallel system also offers the advantage of being able to scale by simply increasing the number of nodes in the cluster. Our system has been developed using the MPI message passing interface. We report performance results from our system operating on the whole 9.5 million block (roughly 4 year) Ethereum mainnet blockchain data. We report timings obtained from tests involving distributed transaction graph construction, partitioning, page ranking of addresses, degree distribution and token transaction counting on a 16 node economical cluster set up on the Amazon cloud. In particular, our system is able to construct distributed graph of 658 million ether and 31 major token transactions in 188 seconds.
The lightning network (LN) is a special network in Bitcoin that uses offchain micropayment channels to scale the blockchain's capability to perform instant transactions without a global block confirmation process. However, micropayment scalability in a large LN and liquidation for small nodes still remain major challenges for the LN. In this paper, we introduce the notion of supernodes and the corresponding supernodes-based pooling to address these challenges. In order to meet the high adaptivity and low maintenance cost in the dynamic LN where users join and leave, supernodes are constructed locally without any global information or label propagation. Each supernode, together with a subset of (non-supernodes) neighbors, forms a supernode-based pool. These pools constitute a partition of the LN. Additionally, supernodes are self-connected. Micro-payment scalability is supported through node set reduction as only supernodes are involved in searching and in payment with other supernodes. Liquidation is enhanced through pooling to redistribute funds within a pool to external channels of its supernode. Extensive simulations have been conducted to validate the improvement in routing scalability and liquidation of the proposed architecture under different settings.
Pablo G. Bringas, Iker Pastor-López, Giuseppe Psaila
Abstract Background BlockChain technology was invented to support bitcoin , currently the most popular virtual currency. Objectives The purpose of this paper is to investigate contemporary BlockChain platforms in financial services. Methods/Approach An unstructured literature review has been used. Results BlockChain in financial services is mostly associated with bitcoin exchange. However, this is a partial view of both BlockChain technology and its possible adoption for financial services: in fact, many BlockChain platforms are now available and many different financial services can be effectively supported by BlockChain platforms, even though they are not based on virtual-money exchange. Furthermore, people are attracted by the concept of smart contract , i.e., a contract that is automatically executed by computer technology, without human intervention. Conclusions The contribution of this paper is twofold: first of all, we introduce the four BlockChain platforms that are now most popular, discussing how they support the smart contract concept; second, we identify some typical categories of financial services, matching each of them with the platform that provides the best support for each category.
Roben Castagna Lunardi, Maher Alharby, Henry C. Nunes, Avelino F. Zorzo · 6 authors
Blockchain technology has been applied to various applications (e.g., smart buildings and smart cities) that typically run in an environment of smart devices, known as Internet-of-Things (IoT). To support these applications, different blockchain architectures, data structures and consensus algorithms have been proposed, tailored to IoT. One such proposal, appendable-block blockchain, is a promising blockchain framework for use in IoT environments. It provides a scalable data structure that allows parallel insertions between independent nodes. However, it has some limitations, in particular related to the possible eclipse attack by malicious gateways and the lack of consensus for transactions insertion. To solve these issues, we propose a new consensus mechanism for appendable-block blockchains, called context-based consensus. Using context-based consensus, information can be inserted in parallel across devices (called context) while ensuring that light-weight consensus is performed to guarantee that a transaction is well-formed and it is placed in the correct order. We implemented context-based consensus and show that using multiple contexts reduces latency and increases the throughput of transaction insertions when compared to consensus without contexts or using single transaction consensus.
The block chain is an innovative technology which opened doors to new applications for solving numerous problems in distributed environments. In this work, we design a block chain based data storage and access framework Twitter application to remove its total dependence on a centralized repository. We use the public block chain and tools like Ganache, Metamask, Truffle and Ethereum IDE for deploying the contracts. In the proposed work, metadata of the files are stored on the block chain and we use the networks like Ropsten and Rinkebey for occurring the Transactions using a peer -to-peer networks. This will provide decentralized storage, distributed processing, and efficient lookup capabilities.
In recently years, the traditional bi-directional smart grid system helps users to save energy such as electricity and also could perform the energy trading with other users in the same grid. However, it also requires a trusted third party to help gird users to maintain the transaction to be fair. If there are some users to deny a transaction in the grid, how the trusted third party is able to trace the real identity is the serious problem to be handle currently. As a result, we proposed a traceable smart grid trading system with smart contract in the peer-to peer(p2p) network. We also combine the smart contract into our scheme and adopt the token-based way to make transaction to be fair in case of unexpected problems happened such as the transaction failure.
Qianqian Pan, Jun Wu, Jianhua Li, Wu Yang · 5 authors
As the next-generation network, beyond fifth generation (B5G) provides transmission capability up to terabits and processes hundreds of exabytes of content data per day from the internet of Everything. From 5G to B5G, the information-centric network (iCN) is expected to play a vital role due to the strong capabilities of content distribution, caching, and processing. As security is a major concern in B5G, content trust of iCN is of critical importance. Lack of content trust leads to the untrustworthiness and maliciousness of services and applications in B5G, such as malicious accidents resulting from the untrusted content of vehicle navigation and autonomous system. To deal with this issue, we propose a blockchain and artificial intelligence (Ai) empowered trust-information- centric network architecture for B5G. First, we design a blockchain-based trust evaluation and circulation scheme for B5G nodes called TrustCoin, which quantifies the credibility of B5G nodes in a dynamic and fine-grained way, and manages trust quotas of B5G nodes as well as trust-coin circulation. Second, to obtain the content credibility, we devise a credibility decision method based on content status and B5G nodes' behaviors by exploiting the excellent properties of deep reinforcement learning, which provides the intelligent allocation criterion for TrustCoin. Third, we propose a smart incentive mechanism for the endogenous trust of B5G networks according to the allocation criterion, thereby establishing the trust-information-centric network. Experimental results have verified the effectiveness of our proposed mechanism.
Blockchain is essentially a distributed ledger shared by all nodes in the system. All nodes in blockchain are equal, and each node holds all transactions and blocks in the network. As the network continues to expand, the data rises linearly. Participates are about to face the problem of storage limitation. Blockchain is hard to scale.This paper introduces ICIStrategy, a multi-node collaborative storage strategy based on intra-cluster integrity. In ICIStrategy, we divide all participates into several clusters. Each cluster requires holding all data of the network, whereas a node within the cluster does not need to maintain data integrity. It aims to solve the storage pressure by reducing the amount data that each participate need to store and reduce communication overhead by collaboratively storing and verifying blocks through in-cluster nodes. Moreover, the ICIStrategy could greatly save the overhead of bootstrapping. We show the mode of operation in our strategy. We further analysis the performance of ICIStrategy and conduct simulation experiments. The results of several comparative experiments show that our strategy just needs 25% of storage space needed by Rapidchain, which indeed solve the problem of storage limitation and improve the blockchain performance.
Blockchain technologies have been rapidly enhanced in recent years. However, its scalability still has limitations in terms of throughput and broadcast delay as the network and the amount of transaction data increase. To improve scalability of blockchain networks, we propose a novel approach named PiChu that accelerates block propagation in blockchain networks by pipelining and verifying chunks of a block in parallel. Accelerating block propagation reduces the mining interval and chance of fork occurring, which in turn increases throughput. Our approach can be applied to the blockchain networks either directly or with a minor modification to the consensus. Through an extensive and large scale simulations, we validate that the proposed PiChu scheme significantly enhances the scalability of blockchain networks. For instance, a 64 MB block can be broadcasted in just 80 seconds in a blockchain network with a million nodes. The efficiency of PiChu broadcasting increases with bigger block sizes and a larger number of nodes in the network.
Over the last years, research activities on blockchain technologies have fairly increased. Firstly introduced with Bitcoin, some projects have since emerged to create or improve blockchain features like privacy while others propose to overcome technical limitations such as scalability and energy consumption. New proposals are often evaluated with ad hoc tools and experimental environments. Reproducibility and comparison of these new contributions with the state of the art of the blockchain technologies are therefore complicated. To the best of our knowledge, only a few tools partially address the design of a generic benchmarking of blockchain technologies (e.g., load generation). In this paper, we introduce BCTMark, a generic framework for benchmarking blockchain technologies on an emulated network in a reproducible way. To illustrate the portability of experiments using BCTMark, we have conducted some experiments on two different testbeds: a cluster of Dell PowerEdge R630 servers (Grid'5000) and one of Raspberry Pi 3+. Experiments have been conducted on three different blockchain systems (Ethereum Clique/Ethash and Hyperledger Fabric) to measure their CPU consumption and energy footprint for different numbers of clients.
Mohammed Amine Togou, Ting Bi, Kapal Dev, Kevin McDonnell · 7 authors
5G technology is expected to enable many innovative applications in different verticals. These applications have heterogeneous performance requirements (e.g., high data rate, low latency, high reliability, and high availability). In order to meet these requirements, 5G networks endorse network flexibility through the deployment of new emerging technologies, mainly network slicing and mobile edge computing. This article introduces a distributed blockchain-enabled network slicing (DBNS) framework that enables service and resource providers to dynamically lease resources to ensure high performance for their end-to-end services. The key component of our framework is the global service provisioning (GSP), which provides admission control for incoming service requests along with dynamic resource assignment by means of a blockchain-based bidding system. The goal is to improve users' experience with diverse services and reduce providers' capital and operational expenditures.
Blockchain technology enables the trustless sharing of distributed ledgers among peers. Despite having valuable properties like decentralisation, and immutability of transactions, it incurs a high performance overhead as compared with traditional databases thus discouraging its further adoption. Even the usage of different transaction processors within the same Blockchain platform, namely Hyperledger Sawtooth, may result in different performance, for the same use case and the same transaction type. This paper proposes a methodology for evaluating the performance of two different transaction processors deployed in the Hyperledger Sawtooth platform. We evaluated experimentally the methodology and present the results of the experimental evaluation which may be useful to blockchain practitioners for future solution designs.