Blockchain for economically sustainable wireless mesh networks

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Kabbinale, AR, Dimogerontakis, E, Selimi, M, et al. Blockchain for economically sustainable wireless mesh networks. Concurrency Computat Pract Exper. 2020; 32:e5349, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.5349. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.Decentralization, in the form of mesh networking and blockchain, two promising technologies, is coming to the telecommunications industry. Mesh networking allows wider low-cost Internet access with infrastructures built from routers contributed by diverse owners, whereas blockchain enables transparency and accountability for investments, revenue, or other forms of economic compensations from sharing of network traffic, content, and services. Crowdsourcing network coverage, combined with crowdfunding costs, can create economically sustainable yet decentralized Internet access. This means that every participant can invest in resources and pay or be paid for usage to recover the costs of network devices and maintenance. While mesh networks and mesh routing protocols enable self-organized networks that expand organically, cryptocurrencies and smart contracts enable the economic coordination among network providers and consumers. We explore and evaluate two existing blockchain software stacks, Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) and Ethereum geth with Proof of Authority (PoA) intended as a local lightweight distributed ledger, deployed in a real city-wide production mesh network and in laboratory network. We quantify the performance and bottlenecks and identify the current limitations and opportunities for improvement to serve locally the needs of wireless mesh networks, without the privacy and economic cost of relying on public blockchains.This paper has been supported by the AmmbrTech Group, the Spanish Government TIN2016‐77836‐C2‐2‐R and the European Community H2020 Programme netCommons (H2020‐688768). The authors would like to thank the people from the Guifi.net (Guifi‐Sants) community network for hosting the servers and supporting the experiments.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Towards Blockchain-enabled Wireless Mesh Networks

Recently, mesh networking and blockchain are two of the hottest technologies in the telecommunications industry. Combining both can reformulate internet access and make connecting to the Internet not only easy, but affordable too. Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a blockchain framework implementation and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation. We evaluate HLF in a real production mesh network and in the laboratory, quantify its performance, bottlenecks and limitations of the current implementation. We identify the opportunities for improvement to serve the needs of wireless mesh access networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first HLF deployment made in a production wireless mesh network

5G and the Internet of everyone: motivation, enablers, and research agenda

As mobile broadband subscriptions grow twice as fast as the fixed ones and the Internet of Things comes forth, the 5G vision of the Internet of Everything (people, devices, and things), becomes a substantial and credible part of the near future. In this paper, we argue that the 5G vision is still missing a fundamental concept to realize its societal promise: the Internet of EveryOne (IoEO), i.e., means and principles to overcome the concerns that the current 5G perspective raises for the digital divide and the network neutrality principle. We discuss open-source software and hardware, Community Networks, mobile edge computing and blockchains as enablers of the IoEO and highlight open research challenges with respect to them. The ultimate objective of our paper is to stimulate research with a short-term, lasting impact also on that 50% (or more) of population that will not enjoy 5G anytime soon. Internet of EveryOne, community networks, 5G, mobile edge computing, network neutrality, community cloud computing.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Vehicle as a Service (VaaS): Leverage Vehicles to Build Service Networks and Capabilities for Smart Cities

Smart cities demand resources for rich immersive sensing, ubiquitous communications, powerful computing, large storage, and high intelligence (SCCSI) to support various kinds of applications, such as public safety, connected and autonomous driving, smart and connected health, and smart living. At the same time, it is widely recognized that vehicles such as autonomous cars, equipped with significantly powerful SCCSI capabilities, will become ubiquitous in future smart cities. By observing the convergence of these two trends, this article advocates the use of vehicles to build a cost-effective service network, called the Vehicle as a Service (VaaS) paradigm, where vehicles empowered with SCCSI capability form a web of mobile servers and communicators to provide SCCSI services in smart cities. Towards this direction, we first examine the potential use cases in smart cities and possible upgrades required for the transition from traditional vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to VaaS. Then, we will introduce the system architecture of the VaaS paradigm and discuss how it can provide SCCSI services in future smart cities, respectively. At last, we identify the open problems of this paradigm and future research directions, including architectural design, service provisioning, incentive design, and security & privacy. We expect that this paper paves the way towards developing a cost-effective and sustainable approach for building smart cities.Comment: 32 pages, 11 figure

Attributes of Big Data Analytics for Data-Driven Decision Making in Cyber-Physical Power Systems

Big data analytics is a virtually new term in power system terminology. This concept delves into the way a massive volume of data is acquired, processed, analyzed to extract insight from available data. In particular, big data analytics alludes to applications of artificial intelligence, machine learning techniques, data mining techniques, time-series forecasting methods. Decision-makers in power systems have been long plagued by incapability and weakness of classical methods in dealing with large-scale real practical cases due to the existence of thousands or millions of variables, being time-consuming, the requirement of a high computation burden, divergence of results, unjustifiable errors, and poor accuracy of the model. Big data analytics is an ongoing topic, which pinpoints how to extract insights from these large data sets. The extant article has enumerated the applications of big data analytics in future power systems through several layers from grid-scale to local-scale. Big data analytics has many applications in the areas of smart grid implementation, electricity markets, execution of collaborative operation schemes, enhancement of microgrid operation autonomy, management of electric vehicle operations in smart grids, active distribution network control, district hub system management, multi-agent energy systems, electricity theft detection, stability and security assessment by PMUs, and better exploitation of renewable energy sources. The employment of big data analytics entails some prerequisites, such as the proliferation of IoT-enabled devices, easily-accessible cloud space, blockchain, etc. This paper has comprehensively conducted an extensive review of the applications of big data analytics along with the prevailing challenges and solutions

When Data Fly: An Open Data Trading System in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Communication between vehicles and their environment (i.e., vehicle-to-everything or V2X communication) in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) has become of particular importance for smart cities. However, economic challenges, such as the cost incurred by data sharing (e.g., due to power consumption), hinder the integration of data sharing in open systems into smart city applications, such as dynamic environmental zones. Moving from open data sharing to open data trading can address the economic challenges and incentivize vehicle drivers to share their data. In this context, integrating distributed ledger technology (DLT) into open systems for data trading is promising for reducing the transaction cost of payments in data trading, avoiding dependencies on third parties, and guaranteeing openness. However, because the integration of DLT conflicts with the short available communication time between fast moving objects in VANETs, it remains unclear how open data trading in VANETs using DLT should be designed to be viable. In this work, we present a system design for data trading in VANETs using DLT. We measure the required communication time for data trading between a vehicle and a roadside unit in a real scenario and estimate the associated cost. Our results show that the proposed system design is technically feasible and economically viable

Efficiency and Sustainability of the Distributed Renewable Hybrid Power Systems Based on the Energy Internet, Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts

The climate changes that are visible today are a challenge for the global research community. In this context, renewable energy sources, fuel cell systems, and other energy generating sources must be optimally combined and connected to the grid system using advanced energy transaction methods. As this book presents the latest solutions in the implementation of fuel cell and renewable energy in mobile and stationary applications such as hybrid and microgrid power systems based on energy internet, blockchain technology, and smart contracts, we hope that they are of interest to readers working in the related fields mentioned above