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Mathematics
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Emerging Networks and Blockchain Technology
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Emerging Networks and Blockchain Technology

A special issue of Mathematics (ISSN 2227-7390). This special issue belongs to the section "Network Science".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2024 | Viewed by 2146

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Shaileshh Bojja Venkatakrishnan

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
Interests: computer networks; blockchains; emerging networking and distributed systems

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Blockchains have steadily grown to become a trillion-dollar global market, with applications across a broad range of areas spanning finance, social media, the decentralized web, gaming, healthcare, supply chains, IoT and beyond. A fundamental aspect affecting the performance of blockchains is the efficiency of the underlying network on which they are built. Removing the network as a performance bottleneck is becoming an important and pressing need, with applications such as the decentralized web aiming to scale to billions of users. Conversely, emerging networking technologies including fog/edge systems, AR/VR, IoT, wireless and sensor networks also stand to benefit from blockchains in a variety of ways.

This Special Issue welcomes high-quality contributions, from theory to practice, on technologies that fall at the intersection of blockchain and networking areas. Topics considered include, but are not limited to:

  • Peer-to-peer network algorithms for blockchains;
  • Networking and off-chain scaling solutions;
  • Integrated consensus/networking protocols;
  • Transport layer and coding techniques for blockchains;
  • Fundamental limits of blockchains under network constraints;
  • Scaling solutions for Web 3.0 applications;
  • Networking for the metaverse;
  • Role of the network in MEV mitigation;
  • Networking in decentralized oracle networks;
  • Market design and network economics in blockchains;
  • Blockchains in emerging networking systems (e.g., edge/cloud computing, IoT, mobile, sensor and next-generation wireless networks);
  • Blockchains and network privacy/security;
  • Measurement studies of blockchain-based decentralized applications on the Internet;
  • Network resource sharing using blockchains.

Dr. Shaileshh Bojja Venkatakrishnan
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Mathematics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • blockchains
  • peer-to-peer networks
  • network algorithms
  • off-chain scaling
  • Web 3.0
  • network privacy and security
  • decentralized applications

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

20 pages, 787 KiB  
Article
Blizzard: A Distributed Consensus Protocol for Mobile Devices
by Mehrdad Kiamari, Bhaskar Krishnamachari  and Seokgu Yun
Mathematics 2024, 12(5), 707; https://doi.org/10.3390/math12050707 - 28 Feb 2024
Viewed by 1169
Abstract
We present Blizzard, a Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) distributed ledger protocol that is aimed at making mobile devices first-class citizens in the consensus process. Blizzard introduces a novel two-tier architecture by having the mobile nodes communicate through online brokers, and includes a decentralized [...] Read more.
We present Blizzard, a Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) distributed ledger protocol that is aimed at making mobile devices first-class citizens in the consensus process. Blizzard introduces a novel two-tier architecture by having the mobile nodes communicate through online brokers, and includes a decentralized matching scheme to ensure each node connects to a certain number of random brokers. Through mathematical analysis, we derive a guaranteed safety region (i.e., the set of ratios of malicious nodes and malicious brokers for which the safety is assured) for the Blizzard protocol. Liveness is shown as well. We analyze the performance of Blizzard in terms of its throughput, latency, and message complexity. Through experiments based on a software implementation, we show that Blizzard is capable of throughput on the order of several thousand transactions per second per shard and sub-second confirmation latency. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Emerging Networks and Blockchain Technology)
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18 pages, 3783 KiB  
Article
Less Is More: Understanding Network Bias in Proof-of-Work Blockchains
by Yifan Mao and Shaileshh Bojja Venkatakrishnan
Mathematics 2023, 11(23), 4741; https://doi.org/10.3390/math11234741 - 23 Nov 2023
Viewed by 611
Abstract
Blockchains are becoming increasingly important in today’s Internet, enabling large-scale decentralized applications with strong security and transparency properties. In a blockchain system, participants maintain and update the server-side state of an application by appending data as blocks onto an immutable, distributed ledger through [...] Read more.
Blockchains are becoming increasingly important in today’s Internet, enabling large-scale decentralized applications with strong security and transparency properties. In a blockchain system, participants maintain and update the server-side state of an application by appending data as blocks onto an immutable, distributed ledger through a consensus protocol within a peer-to-peer network. There has been a significant increase in profit in mining blocks. For instance, Bitcoin miners currently receive over USD 200,000 per mined block. An essential determinant of these rewards is the time it takes to disseminate newly mined blocks across the network. This paper addresses the challenge of optimizing mining rewards by exploring topology design in a wide-area blockchain network utilizing a Proof-of-Work consensus protocol. We show that under low block times, the geographical location of a miner critically impacts the number of successful blocks mined by the miner. We also show that a miner may improve its success rate by increasing its connectivity to the network. However, contrary to the general wisdom that a faster network is always better for a miner, we show that increasing network connectivity (e.g., by adding more neighbors) is beneficial to a miner only up to a point after which the miner’s rewards degrade. This is because when a miner improves its connectivity, it inadvertently also aids other miners in increasing their connectivity. We also present a network-level collusion attack in which a miner can increase its block success rate by becoming part of a tightly connected cluster. Here too, we observe that the mining gains obtained increase with cluster size only up to a point, and decrease thereafter. Our findings highlight that the network topology is a key variable affecting miner performance in PoW blockchains that must not be overlooked. We demonstrate our observations via detailed simulations modeled using real-world measurement data. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Emerging Networks and Blockchain Technology)
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