Search Results (7)

The Publisher-Subscriber model of data exchange has been a popular method for many Internet-based applications, including the Internet of Things (IoT). A traditional PS system consists of publishers, subscribers, and a broker. The publishers create new data for a registered topic, and the data broker relays the data to the corresponding subscribers. This paper introduces a blockchain-based smart broker for the publisher-subscriber (PS) framework for the IoT network. As IoT data comes from devices operating in various environments, it may suffer from multiple challenges, such as hardware failures, connectivity issues, and external vulnerabilities, thereby impacting data quality in terms of accuracy and timeliness. It is important to monitor this data and inform subscribers about its quality. The proposed smart broker is composed of multiple smart contracts that continuously monitor the quality of the topic data by assessing its relationship with other related topics and its drift or delay in publishing intervals. It assigns a reputation score to each topic computed based on its quality and drifts, and it passes both the original data and the reputation score as a measure of quality to the subscriber. Furthermore, the smart broker can suggest substitute topics to subscribers when the requested topic data are unavailable or of very poor quality. The evaluation shows that a smart broker efficiently monitors the reputation of the topic data, and its efficiency increases notably when the data quality is worse. As the broker is run inside the blockchain, it automatically inherits the advantages of the blockchain, and the quality scoring is indisputable based on immutable data. Full article

In this paper, we propose a smart contract broker to improve the reusability of smart contracts in a blockchain environment. The current blockchain platform lacks a standard approach to sharing and managing smart contracts, which makes it difficult for developers to reuse them and leads to efficiency issues. The proposed smart contract broker uses tags to identify and organize smart contracts, and it provides an environment for comparing and reusing smart contracts. This improves the reusability of smart contracts and efficiency. The proposed smart contract broker can be applied as a reference model that increases the flexibility and reusability of smart contract management in a blockchain environment. Full article

The amalgamation of heterogeneous generations of mobile cellular networks around the globe has resulted in diverse data speed experiences for end users. At present, there are no defined mechanisms in place for subscribers of a mobile network operator (MNO) to use the services of third-party WiFi providers. MNOs also have no standardized procedures to securely interact with each other, and allow their subscribers to use third-party services on a pay-as-you-go basis. This paper proposes a blockchain-enabled offloading framework that allows a subscriber of a mobile operator to temporarily use another MNO or WiFi provider’s higher-speed network. A smart contract is employed to allow diverse entities, such as MNOs, brokers and WiFi providers, to automatically execute mutual agreements, to enable the utilization of third-party infrastructure in a secure and controlled manner. The proposed framework is tested using Ethereum’s testnet on the Goerli network using Alchemy and Hardhat. The analysis of the results obtained shows that the proposed technique helps mobile operators to offer improved user experience in the form of average speed and latency. The experiments show that the average time taken to deliver a 500 MB file is reduced from 10.23 s to 0.91 s for the global average scenario, from 6.09 s to 0.50 s for 5G, from 13.50 s to 0.50 s for 4G-LTE, from 41.11 s to 0.49 s for 4G, and from 339.11 s to 0.49 s for the 3G scenario. The results also show that, with WiFi offloading, users from all cellular generations can enjoy a similar quality of services, because delivery time ranges from 0.49 s to 0.91 s for offloaded experiments whereas for the non-offloaded scenario it ranges from 6.09 s to 339.11 s. Full article

In this paper, to balance power supplement from the solar energy’s intermittent and unpredictable generation, we design a solar energy generation and trading platform (EggBlock) using Internet of Things (IoT) systems and blockchain technique. Without a centralized broker, the proposed EggBlock platform can promote energy trading between users equipped with solar panels, and balance demand and generation. By applying the second price sealed-bid auction, which is one of the suitable pricing mechanisms in the blockchain technique, it is possible to derive truthful bidding of market participants according to their utility function and induce the proceed transaction. Furthermore, for efficient generation of solar energy, EggBlock proposes a Q-learning-based dynamic panel control mechanism. Specifically, we set the instantaneous direction of the solar panel and the amount of power generation as the state and reward, respectively. The angle of the panel to be moved becomes an action at the next time step. Then, we continuously update the Q-table using transfer learning, which can cope with recent changes in the surrounding environment or weather. We implement the proposed EggBlock platform using Ethereum’s smart contract for reliable transactions. At the end of the paper, measurement-based experiments show that the proposed EggBlock achieves reliable and transparent energy trading on the blockchain and converges to the optimal direction with short iterations. Finally, the results of the study show that an average energy generation gain of 35% is obtained. Full article

Digital trading apps are evidence of developing open innovations in the financial sector. The investment industry (including banks and brokers) can greatly benefit from the utilization of digital trading applications and corresponding tools, such as smart contracts. The goal of this research paper is to examine the possibility that brokers’ existing mobile apps outperform banks without mobile apps in the Russian financial sector. The efficiency of brokers is compared to banks in Russia. The results of these institutions’ activities are related to the number of profitable banks, which declines as a sign of high efficiency. The paper uses methods of t-test, linear and polynomial regression analysis between assets (dependent variable) and the profit to assets (independent variable) in Russia. The article finds the different directions of the utilization of the discussed technology, and they all share the consequential growth after the technology’s introduction. The paper also discusses the various areas of digital trading apps implementation and the future contributions for the Russian banking system and economy. Full article

In the global trucking industry, vertical collaboration between shippers and carriers is attained by intermediaries, called brokers. Brokers organize carriers for a shipper in accordance with its quality and price requirements, and support carriers to collaborate horizontally by sharing a large distribution order from a shipper. Brokers also act as trustees, preventing the passing of private information of any party to the others. Despite these benefits, intermediaries in the trucking industry are involved in several sustainability problems, including high costs, high levels of carbon emissions, high percentages of empty miles, low-capacity utilizations, and driver shortages. Several studies have acknowledged the importance of improving collaboration to address these problems. Obviously, the major concern of brokers is not collaboration, but rather to optimize their own gains. This paper investigates the potential of blockchain technology to improve collaboration in the trucking industry, by eliminating brokers while preserving their responsibilities as organizers and trustees. This paper extends the transportation control tower concept from the logistics literature, and presents a system architecture for its implementation through smart contracts on a blockchain network. In the proposed system, the scalability and privacy of trucking operations are ensured through integration with privacy-preserving off-chain computation and storage solutions (running outside of the blockchain). The potential of this design artifact for fostering collaboration in the trucking industry was evaluated by both blockchain technology experts and trucking industry professionals. Full article

Nowadays, it has been recognized that blockchain can provide the technological infrastructure for developing decentralized, secure, and reliable smart energy grid management systems. However, an open issue that slows the adoption of blockchain technology in the energy sector is the low scalability and high processing overhead when dealing with the real-time energy data collected by smart energy meters. Thus, in this paper, we propose a scalable second tier solution which combines the blockchain ledger with distributed queuing systems and NoSQL (Not Only SQL database) databases to allow the registration of energy transactions less frequently on the chain without losing the tamper-evident benefits brought by the blockchain technology. At the same time, we propose a technique for tamper-evident registration of smart meters’ energy data and associated energy transactions using digital fingerprinting which allows the energy transaction to be linked hashed-back on-chain, while the sensors data is stored off-chain. A prototype was implemented using Ethereum and smart contracts for the on-chain components while for the off-chain components we used Cassandra database and RabbitMQ messaging broker. The prototype proved to be effective in managing a settlement of energy imbalances use-case and during the evaluation conducted in simulated environment shows promising results in terms of scalability, throughput, and tampering of energy data sampled by smart energy meters. Full article