240 research outputs found
LightChain: A DHT-based Blockchain for Resource Constrained Environments
As an append-only distributed database, blockchain is utilized in a vast
variety of applications including the cryptocurrency and Internet-of-Things
(IoT). The existing blockchain solutions have downsides in communication and
storage efficiency, convergence to centralization, and consistency problems. In
this paper, we propose LightChain, which is the first blockchain architecture
that operates over a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) of participating peers.
LightChain is a permissionless blockchain that provides addressable blocks and
transactions within the network, which makes them efficiently accessible by all
the peers. Each block and transaction is replicated within the DHT of peers and
is retrieved in an on-demand manner. Hence, peers in LightChain are not
required to retrieve or keep the entire blockchain. LightChain is fair as all
of the participating peers have a uniform chance of being involved in the
consensus regardless of their influence such as hashing power or stake.
LightChain provides a deterministic fork-resolving strategy as well as a
blacklisting mechanism, and it is secure against colluding adversarial peers
attacking the availability and integrity of the system. We provide mathematical
analysis and experimental results on scenarios involving 10K nodes to
demonstrate the security and fairness of LightChain. As we experimentally show
in this paper, compared to the mainstream blockchains like Bitcoin and
Ethereum, LightChain requires around 66 times less per node storage, and is
around 380 times faster on bootstrapping a new node to the system, while each
LightChain node is rewarded equally likely for participating in the protocol
Fast Structuring of Radio Networks for Multi-Message Communications
We introduce collision free layerings as a powerful way to structure radio
networks. These layerings can replace hard-to-compute BFS-trees in many
contexts while having an efficient randomized distributed construction. We
demonstrate their versatility by using them to provide near optimal distributed
algorithms for several multi-message communication primitives.
Designing efficient communication primitives for radio networks has a rich
history that began 25 years ago when Bar-Yehuda et al. introduced fast
randomized algorithms for broadcasting and for constructing BFS-trees. Their
BFS-tree construction time was rounds, where is the network
diameter and is the number of nodes. Since then, the complexity of a
broadcast has been resolved to be rounds. On the other hand, BFS-trees have been used as a crucial building
block for many communication primitives and their construction time remained a
bottleneck for these primitives.
We introduce collision free layerings that can be used in place of BFS-trees
and we give a randomized construction of these layerings that runs in nearly
broadcast time, that is, w.h.p. in rounds for any constant . We then use these
layerings to obtain: (1) A randomized algorithm for gathering messages
running w.h.p. in rounds. (2) A randomized -message
broadcast algorithm running w.h.p. in rounds. These
algorithms are optimal up to the small difference in the additive
poly-logarithmic term between and . Moreover, they imply the
first optimal round randomized gossip algorithm
Distributed Computation in Dynamic Networks
In this report we investigate distributed computation in dynamic networks in which the network topology changes from round to round. We consider a worst-case model in which the communication links for each round are chosen by an adversary, and nodes do not know who their neighbors for the current round are before they broadcast their messages. The model is intended to capture mobile networks and wireless networks, in which mobility and interference render communication unpredictable. The model allows the study of the fundamental computation power of dynamic networks. In particular, it captures mobile networks and wireless networks, in which mobility and interference render communication unpredictable. In contrast to much of the existing work on dynamic networks, we do not assume that the network eventually stops changing; we require correctness and termination even in networks that change continually. We introduce a stability property called T-interval connectivity (for T >= 1), which stipulates that for every T consecutive rounds there exists a stable connected spanning subgraph. For T = 1 this means that the graph is connected in every round, but changes arbitrarily between rounds. Algorithms for the dynamic graph model must cope with these unceasing changes. We show that in 1-interval connected graphs it is possible for nodes to determine the size of the network and compute any computable function of their initial inputs in O(n^2) rounds using messages of size O(log n + d), where d is the size of the input to a single node. Further, if the graph is T-interval connected for T > 1, the computation can be sped up by a factor of T, and any function can be computed in O(n + n^2 / T) rounds using messages of size O(log n + d). We also give two lower bounds on the gossip problem, which requires the nodes to disseminate k pieces of information to all the nodes in the network. We show an Omega(n log k) bound on gossip in 1-interval connected graphs against centralized algorithms, and an Omega(n + nk / T) bound on exchanging k pieces of information in T-interval connected graphs for a restricted class of randomized distributed algorithms. The T-interval connected dynamic graph model is a novel model, which we believe opens new avenues for research in the theory of distributed computing in wireless, mobile and dynamic networks
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