Blockchain And The Future of the Internet: A Comprehensive Review

Blockchain is challenging the status quo of the central trust infrastructure currently prevalent in the Internet towards a design principle that is underscored by decentralization, transparency, and trusted auditability. In ideal terms, blockchain advocates a decentralized, transparent, and more democratic version of the Internet. Essentially being a trusted and decentralized database, blockchain finds its applications in fields as varied as the energy sector, forestry, fisheries, mining, material recycling, air pollution monitoring, supply chain management, and their associated operations. In this paper, we present a survey of blockchain-based network applications. Our goal is to cover the evolution of blockchain-based systems that are trying to bring in a renaissance in the existing, mostly centralized, space of network applications. While re-imagining the space with blockchain, we highlight various common challenges, pitfalls, and shortcomings that can occur. Our aim is to make this work as a guiding reference manual for someone interested in shifting towards a blockchain-based solution for one's existing use case or automating one from the ground up.Comment: Under Review in IEEE COMS

Security and Privacy Issues in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing transforms the way information technology (IT) is consumed and managed, promising improved cost efficiencies, accelerated innovation, faster time-to-market, and the ability to scale applications on demand (Leighton, 2009). According to Gartner, while the hype grew exponentially during 2008 and continued since, it is clear that there is a major shift towards the cloud computing model and that the benefits may be substantial (Gartner Hype-Cycle, 2012). However, as the shape of the cloud computing is emerging and developing rapidly both conceptually and in reality, the legal/contractual, economic, service quality, interoperability, security and privacy issues still pose significant challenges. In this chapter, we describe various service and deployment models of cloud computing and identify major challenges. In particular, we discuss three critical challenges: regulatory, security and privacy issues in cloud computing. Some solutions to mitigate these challenges are also proposed along with a brief presentation on the future trends in cloud computing deployment.Comment: 42 pages, 2 Figures, and 5 Tables. The book chapter is accepted for publication and is expected to be published in the second half of 201

Towards Distributed Clouds

This review focuses on the evolution of cloud computing and distributed ledger technologies (blockchains) over the last decade. Cloud computing relies mainly on a conceptually centralized service provisioning model, while blockchain technologies originate from a peer-to-peer and a completely distributed approach. Still, noteworthy commonalities between both approaches are often overlooked by researchers. Therefore, to the best of the authors knowledge, this paper reviews both domains in parallel for the first time. We conclude that both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. The advantages of centralized service provisioning approaches are often the disadvantages of distributed ledger approaches and vice versa. It is obviously an interesting question whether both approaches could be combined in a way that the advantages can be added while the disadvantages could be avoided. We derive a software stack that could build the foundation unifying the best of these two worlds and that would avoid existing shortcomings like vendor lock-in, some security problems, and inherent platform dependencies

A Design Blueprint for Virtual Organizations in a Service Oriented Landscape

"United we stand, divided we fall" is a well known saying. We are living in the era of virtual collaborations. Advancement on conceptual and technological level has enhanced the way people communicate. Everything-as-a-Service once a dream, now becoming a reality. Problem nature has also been changed over the time. Today, e-Collaborations are applied to all the domains possible. Extensive data and computing resources are in need and assistance from human experts is also becoming essential. This puts a great responsibility on Information Technology (IT) researchers and developers to provide generic platforms where user can easily communicate and solve their problems. To realize this concept, distributed computing has offered many paradigms, e.g. cluster, grid, cloud computing. Virtual Organization (VO) is a logical orchestration of globally dispersed resources to achieve common goals. Existing paradigms and technology are used to form Virtual Organization, but lack of standards remained a critical issue for last two decades. Our research endeavor focuses on developing a design blueprint for Virtual Organization building process. The proposed standardization process is a two phase activity. First phase provides requirement analysis and the second phase presents a Reference Architecture for Virtual Organization (RAVO). This form of standardization is chosen to accommodate both technological and paradigm shift. We categorize our efforts in two parts. First part consists of a pattern to identify the requirements and components of a Virtual Organization. Second part details a generic framework based on the concept of Everything-as-a-Service

Survey of Consensus Protocols

Distributed ledger technology has gained wide popularity and adoption since the emergence of bitcoin in 2008 which is based on proof of work (PoW). It is a distributed, transparent and immutable database of records of all the transactions or events that have been shared and executed among the participants. All the transactions are verified and maintained by multiple nodes across a network without a central authority through a distributed cryptographic mechanism, a consensus protocol. It forms the core of this technology that not only validates the information appended to the ledger but also ensures the order in which it is appended across all the nodes. It is the foundation of its security, accountability and trust. While many researchers are working on improving the current protocol to be quantum resistant, fault-tolerant, and energy-efficient. Others are focused on developing different variants of the protocol, best suited for specific use cases. In this paper, we shall review different consensus protocols of distributed ledger technologies and their implementations. We shall also review their properties, concept and similar-work followed by a brief analysis

A Survey of Data Fusion in Smart City Applications

The advancement of various research sectors such as Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning, Data Mining, Big Data, and Communication Technology has shed some light in transforming an urban city integrating the aforementioned techniques to a commonly known term - Smart City. With the emergence of smart city, plethora of data sources have been made available for wide variety of applications. The common technique for handling multiple data sources is data fusion, where it improves data output quality or extracts knowledge from the raw data. In order to cater evergrowing highly complicated applications, studies in smart city have to utilize data from various sources and evaluate their performance based on multiple aspects. To this end, we introduce a multi-perspectives classification of the data fusion to evaluate the smart city applications. Moreover, we applied the proposed multi-perspectives classification to evaluate selected applications in each domain of the smart city. We conclude the paper by discussing potential future direction and challenges of data fusion integration.Comment: Accepted and To be published in Elsevier Information Fusio

Mobile Cloud Business Process Management System for the Internet of Things: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a comprehensive environment that consists of a large number of smart devices interconnecting heterogeneous physical objects to the Internet. Many domains such as logistics, manufacturing, agriculture, urban computing, home automation, ambient assisted living and various ubiquitous computing applications have utilised IoT technologies. Meanwhile, Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) have become a successful and efficient solution for coordinated management and optimised utilisation of resources/entities. However, past BPMS have not considered many issues they will face in managing large scale connected heterogeneous IoT entities. Without fully understanding the behaviour, capability and state of the IoT entities, the BPMS can fail to manage the IoT integrated information systems. In this paper, we analyse existing BPMS for IoT and identify the limitations and their drawbacks based on Mobile Cloud Computing perspective. Later, we discuss a number of open challenges in BPMS for IoT.Comment: 56 pages, 10 figures, 5 table

Privacy in Sensor-Driven Human Data Collection: A Guide for Practitioners

In recent years, the amount of information collected about human beings has increased dramatically. This development has been partially driven by individuals posting and storing data about themselves and friends using online social networks or collecting their data for self-tracking purposes (quantified-self movement). Across the sciences, researchers conduct studies collecting data with an unprecedented resolution and scale. Using computational power combined with mathematical models, such rich datasets can be mined to infer underlying patterns, thereby providing insights into human nature. Much of the data collected is sensitive. It is private in the sense that most individuals would feel uncomfortable sharing their collected personal data publicly. For this reason, the need for solutions to ensure the privacy of the individuals generating data has grown alongside the data collection efforts. Out of all the massive data collection efforts, this paper focuses on efforts directly instrumenting human behavior, and notes that -- in many cases -- the privacy of participants is not sufficiently addressed. For example, study purposes are often not explicit, informed consent is ill-defined, and security and sharing protocols are only partially disclosed. This paper provides a survey of the work related to addressing privacy issues in research studies that collect detailed sensor data on human behavior. Reflections on the key problems and recommendations for future work are included. We hope the overview of the privacy-related practices in massive data collection studies can be used as a frame of reference for practitioners in the field. Although focused on data collection in an academic context, we believe that many of the challenges and solutions we identify are also relevant and useful for other domains where massive data collection takes place, including businesses and governments

Analytics for the Internet of Things: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) envisions a world-wide, interconnected network of smart physical entities. These physical entities generate a large amount of data in operation and as the IoT gains momentum in terms of deployment, the combined scale of those data seems destined to continue to grow. Increasingly, applications for the IoT involve analytics. Data analytics is the process of deriving knowledge from data, generating value like actionable insights from them. This article reviews work in the IoT and big data analytics from the perspective of their utility in creating efficient, effective and innovative applications and services for a wide spectrum of domains. We review the broad vision for the IoT as it is shaped in various communities, examine the application of data analytics across IoT domains, provide a categorisation of analytic approaches and propose a layered taxonomy from IoT data to analytics. This taxonomy provides us with insights on the appropriateness of analytical techniques, which in turn shapes a survey of enabling technology and infrastructure for IoT analytics. Finally, we look at some tradeoffs for analytics in the IoT that can shape future research

Compress-Store on Blockchain: A Decentralized Data Processing and Immutable Storage for Multimedia Streaming

Decentralization for data storage is a challenging problem for blockchain-based solutions as the blocksize plays the key role for scalability. In addition, specific requirements of multimedia data calls for various changes in the blockchain technology internals.Considering one of the most popular applications of secure multimedia streaming, i.e., video surveillance, it is not clear how to judiciously encode incentivisation, immutability and compression into a viable ecosystem. In this study, we provide a genuine scheme that achieves this encoding for a video surveillance application. The proposed scheme provides a novel integration of data compression, immutable off-chain data storage using a new consensus protocol namely, proof of work storage (PoWS) in order to enable fully useful work to be performed by the miner nodes of the network. The proposed idea is the first step towards achieving greener application of blockchain-based environment to the video storage business that utilizes system resources efficiently.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, submitted to IEEE Transactions on services computin