Blockchain for Healthcare: Securing Patient Data and Enabling Trusted Artificial Intelligence

Advances in information technology are digitizing the healthcare domain with the aim of improved medical services, diagnostics, continuous monitoring using wearables, etc., at reduced costs. This digitization improves the ease of computation, storage and access of medical records which enables better treatment experiences for patients. However, it comes with a risk of cyber attacks and security and privacy concerns on this digital data. In this work, we propose a Blockchain based solution for healthcare records to address the security and privacy concerns which are currently not present in existing e-Health systems. This work also explores the potential of building trusted Artificial Intelligence models over Blockchain in e-Health, where a transparent platform for consent-based data sharing is designed. Provenance of the consent of individuals and traceability of data sources used for building and training the AI model is captured in an immutable distributed data store. The audit trail of the data access captured using Blockchain provides the data owner to understand the exposure of the data. It also helps the user to understand the revenue models that could be built on top of this framework for commercial data sharing to build trusted AI models

The Merits of a Decentralized Pollution-Monitoring System Based on Distributed Ledger Technology

Pollution-monitoring systems (PMSs) are used worldwide to sense environmental changes, such as air quality conditions or temperature increases, and to monitor compliance with regulations. However, organizations manage the environmental data collected by such PMSs in a centralized manner, which is why recorded environmental data are vulnerable to manipulation. Moreover, the analysis of pollution data often lacks transparency to outsiders, which may lead to wrong decisions regarding environmental regulations. To address these challenges, we propose a software design for PMSs based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) and the long-range (LoRa) protocol for flexible, transparent, and energy-efficient environment monitoring and data management. To design the PMS, we conducted a comprehensive requirements analysis for PMSs. We benchmarked different consensus mechanisms (e.g., BFT-SMaRt and Raft) and digital signature schemes (e.g., ECDSA and EdDSA) to adequately design the PMS and fulfill the identified requirements

A Survey on Consensus Mechanisms and Mining Strategy Management in Blockchain Networks

© 2013 IEEE. The past decade has witnessed the rapid evolution in blockchain technologies, which has attracted tremendous interests from both the research communities and industries. The blockchain network was originated from the Internet financial sector as a decentralized, immutable ledger system for transactional data ordering. Nowadays, it is envisioned as a powerful backbone/framework for decentralized data processing and data-driven self-organization in flat, open-access networks. In particular, the plausible characteristics of decentralization, immutability, and self-organization are primarily owing to the unique decentralized consensus mechanisms introduced by blockchain networks. This survey is motivated by the lack of a comprehensive literature review on the development of decentralized consensus mechanisms in blockchain networks. In this paper, we provide a systematic vision of the organization of blockchain networks. By emphasizing the unique characteristics of decentralized consensus in blockchain networks, our in-depth review of the state-of-the-art consensus protocols is focused on both the perspective of distributed consensus system design and the perspective of incentive mechanism design. From a game-theoretic point of view, we also provide a thorough review of the strategy adopted for self-organization by the individual nodes in the blockchain backbone networks. Consequently, we provide a comprehensive survey of the emerging applications of blockchain networks in a broad area of telecommunication. We highlight our special interest in how the consensus mechanisms impact these applications. Finally, we discuss several open issues in the protocol design for blockchain consensus and the related potential research directions

Distributed Ledger Technologies for Network Slicing: A Survey

Network slicing is one of the fundamental tenets of Fifth Generation (5G)/Sixth Generation (6G) networks. Deploying slices requires end-to-end (E2E) control of services and the underlying resources in a network substrate featuring an increasing number of stakeholders. Beyond the technical difficulties this entails, there is a long list of administrative negotiations among parties that do not necessarily trust each other, which often requires costly manual processes, including the legal construction of neutral entities. In this context, Blockchain comes to the rescue by bringing its decentralized yet immutable and auditable lemdger, which has a high potential in the telco arena. In this sense, it may help to automate some of the above costly processes. There have been some proposals in this direction that are applied to various problems among different stakeholders. This paper aims at structuring this field of knowledge by, first, providing introductions to network slicing and blockchain technologies. Then, state-of-the-art is presented through a global architecture that aggregates the various proposals into a coherent whole while showing the motivation behind applying Blockchain and smart contracts to network slicing. And finally, some limitations of current work, future challenges and research directions are also presented.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Formación Personal Investigador (FPI) under Grant PRE2018-086061, in part by the TRUE5G under Grant PID2019-108713RB-C52/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, and in part by the European Union (EU) H2020 The 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5GPPP) 5Growth Project 856709.Publicad

Blockchain systems, technologies and applications: a methodology perspective

In the past decade, blockchain has shown a promising vision to build trust without any powerful third party in a secure, decentralized and scalable manner. However, due to the wide application and future development from cryptocurrency to the Internet of things, blockchain is an extremely complex system enabling integration with mathematics, computer science, communication and network engineering, etc. By revealing the intrinsic relationship between blockchain and communication, networking and computing from a methodological perspective, it provided a view to the challenge that engineers, experts and researchers hardly fully understand the blockchain process in a systematic view from top to bottom. In this article we first introduce how blockchain works, the research activities and challenges, and illustrate the roadmap involving the classic methodologies with typical blockchain use cases and topics. Second, in blockchain systems, how to adopt stochastic process, game theory, optimization theory, and machine learning to study the blockchain running processes and design the blockchain protocols/algorithms are discussed in details. Moreover, the advantages and limitations using these methods are also summarized as the guide of future work to be further considered. Finally, some remaining problems from technical, commercial and political views are discussed as the open issues. The main findings of this article will provide a survey from a methodological perspective to study theoretical model for blockchain fundamentals understanding, design network service for blockchain-based mechanisms and algorithms, as well as apply blockchain for the Internet of things, etc