Integration of Blockchain and Auction Models: A Survey, Some Applications, and Challenges

In recent years, blockchain has gained widespread attention as an emerging technology for decentralization, transparency, and immutability in advancing online activities over public networks. As an essential market process, auctions have been well studied and applied in many business fields due to their efficiency and contributions to fair trade. Complementary features between blockchain and auction models trigger a great potential for research and innovation. On the one hand, the decentralized nature of blockchain can provide a trustworthy, secure, and cost-effective mechanism to manage the auction process; on the other hand, auction models can be utilized to design incentive and consensus protocols in blockchain architectures. These opportunities have attracted enormous research and innovation activities in both academia and industry; however, there is a lack of an in-depth review of existing solutions and achievements. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of these two research topics. We review the existing solutions for integrating blockchain and auction models, with some application-oriented taxonomies generated. Additionally, we highlight some open research challenges and future directions towards integrated blockchain-auction models

Incentive Mechanisms for Participatory Sensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Participatory sensing is a powerful paradigm which takes advantage of smartphones to collect and analyze data beyond the scale of what was previously possible. Given that participatory sensing systems rely completely on the users' willingness to submit up-to-date and accurate information, it is paramount to effectively incentivize users' active and reliable participation. In this paper, we survey existing literature on incentive mechanisms for participatory sensing systems. In particular, we present a taxonomy of existing incentive mechanisms for participatory sensing systems, which are subsequently discussed in depth by comparing and contrasting different approaches. Finally, we discuss an agenda of open research challenges in incentivizing users in participatory sensing.Comment: Updated version, 4/25/201

Transforming Energy Networks via Peer to Peer Energy Trading: Potential of Game Theoretic Approaches

Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading has emerged as a next-generation energy management mechanism for the smart grid that enables each prosumer of the network to participate in energy trading with one another and the grid. This poses a significant challenge in terms of modeling the decision-making process of each participant with conflicting interest and motivating prosumers to participate in energy trading and to cooperate, if necessary, for achieving different energy management goals. Therefore, such decision-making process needs to be built on solid mathematical and signal processing tools that can ensure an efficient operation of the smart grid. This paper provides an overview of the use of game theoretic approaches for P2P energy trading as a feasible and effective means of energy management. As such, we discuss various games and auction theoretic approaches by following a systematic classification to provide information on the importance of game theory for smart energy research. Then, the paper focuses on the P2P energy trading describing its key features and giving an introduction to an existing P2P testbed. Further, the paper zooms into the detail of some specific game and auction theoretic models that have recently been used in P2P energy trading and discusses some important finding of these schemes.Comment: 38 pages, single column, double spac

Development of an ECDLP based Traceable Blind Signature Scheme and its Application to E-Auction.

With the increase in internet users, E-Commerce has been grown exponentially in recent years. E-Auction is one among them. But its security and robustness is still a challenge. The electronic auction centers remain to be insecure and anonymity, bid privacy and other requirements are under the threat by malicious hackers. Any auction protocol must not leak the anonymity and bid privacy of an honest bidder. Keeping these requirements in mind, we have proposed a new electronic auction scheme using blind signature. Moreover our scheme is based upon elliptic curve cryptography which provides similar level of security with comparatively smaller key size. Due to the smaller key size, the space requirement can be reduced which further allows our E-Auction scheme to implement in a mobile application which has a constrained environment like low bandwidth, memory and computational power. Blind signature is a special kind of digital signature where the message privacy can be retained by blinding the message and getting a signature on that. It can be universally verifiable and signer can’t repudiate of signing the document. Moreover it also satisfies the integrity and authenticity of the message. Due to these features of a blind signature, it can easily be applied on an E-Auction scheme. So we have proposed an efficient blind signature protocol according to the requirements of E-Auction which is based upon the hard problem of solving elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem(ECDLP). Then we have successfully applied it in our E-Auction scheme. In this thesis, we developed an Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP) based blind signature scheme which can be implemented on our E-Auction protocol. Both the schemes are proved to be resistant to active attacks and satisfies the requirements which are necessary for online auction