3,251 research outputs found
Social Welfare Maximization Auction in Edge Computing Resource Allocation for Mobile Blockchain
Blockchain, an emerging decentralized security system, has been applied in
many applications, such as bitcoin, smart grid, and Internet-of-Things.
However, running the mining process may cost too much energy consumption and
computing resource usage on handheld devices, which restricts the use of
blockchain in mobile environments. In this paper, we consider deploying edge
computing service to support the mobile blockchain. We propose an auction-based
edge computing resource market of the edge computing service provider. Since
there is competition among miners, the allocative externalities (positive and
negative) are taken into account in the model. In our auction mechanism, we
maximize the social welfare while guaranteeing the truthfulness, individual
rationality and computational efficiency. Based on blockchain mining experiment
results, we define a hash power function that characterizes the probability of
successfully mining a block. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the
performance of our auction mechanism which shows that our edge computing
resources market model can efficiently solve the social welfare maximization
problem for the edge computing service provider
A Bayesian Approach to Identify Bitcoin Users
Bitcoin is a digital currency and electronic payment system operating over a
peer-to-peer network on the Internet. One of its most important properties is
the high level of anonymity it provides for its users. The users are identified
by their Bitcoin addresses, which are random strings in the public records of
transactions, the blockchain. When a user initiates a Bitcoin-transaction, his
Bitcoin client program relays messages to other clients through the Bitcoin
network. Monitoring the propagation of these messages and analyzing them
carefully reveal hidden relations. In this paper, we develop a mathematical
model using a probabilistic approach to link Bitcoin addresses and transactions
to the originator IP address. To utilize our model, we carried out experiments
by installing more than a hundred modified Bitcoin clients distributed in the
network to observe as many messages as possible. During a two month observation
period we were able to identify several thousand Bitcoin clients and bind their
transactions to geographical locations
Using Blockchain Technology for The Organ Procurement and Transplant Network
The organ donation system in the United States is centralized and difficult to audit by the general public. This centralized approach may lead to data integrity issues in the future. The Organ Procurement and Transplant Network (OPTN) was built and maintained by a non-governmental organization called the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) under its proprietary UNet(SM) umbrella platform. This platform is made up of proprietary closed source software and does not provide the general public easy access to the organ transplant data for auditing. This study investigates the feasibility, challenges, and advantages of a blockchain-based OPTN.
A prototype of a blockchain-based OPTN was created using the Hyperledger Fabric framework. The policies and guidelines issued by the United States Department of Health and Human Services for UNOS and the OPTN were used as the basis of this prototype. Four factors were identified to have a direct effect on the performance of this system, viz. max batch time out, max block size, endorsement policy, and transaction rate. Additionally, two variants of the blockchain chaincode were also developed. The first variant performed the organ-candidate matching inside the blockchain (Scheme A), and the second variant performed it outside the blockchain (Scheme B).
Analysis of these data showed that Scheme A outperformed Scheme B in all experiments for write-operations. However, the read operations remained unaffected by any of the experiment variables in the given environment.
Based on these results, it is recommended to perform the organ-candidate matching on the blockchain with the max batch time out close to the transaction rate
Cloud/fog computing resource management and pricing for blockchain networks
The mining process in blockchain requires solving a proof-of-work puzzle,
which is resource expensive to implement in mobile devices due to the high
computing power and energy needed. In this paper, we, for the first time,
consider edge computing as an enabler for mobile blockchain. In particular, we
study edge computing resource management and pricing to support mobile
blockchain applications in which the mining process of miners can be offloaded
to an edge computing service provider. We formulate a two-stage Stackelberg
game to jointly maximize the profit of the edge computing service provider and
the individual utilities of the miners. In the first stage, the service
provider sets the price of edge computing nodes. In the second stage, the
miners decide on the service demand to purchase based on the observed prices.
We apply the backward induction to analyze the sub-game perfect equilibrium in
each stage for both uniform and discriminatory pricing schemes. For the uniform
pricing where the same price is applied to all miners, the existence and
uniqueness of Stackelberg equilibrium are validated by identifying the best
response strategies of the miners. For the discriminatory pricing where the
different prices are applied to different miners, the Stackelberg equilibrium
is proved to exist and be unique by capitalizing on the Variational Inequality
theory. Further, the real experimental results are employed to justify our
proposed model.Comment: 16 pages, double-column version, accepted by IEEE Internet of Things
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