55,545 research outputs found
Atomic Appends: Selling Cars and Coordinating Armies with Multiple Distributed Ledgers
The various applications using Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) or blockchains, have led to the introduction of a new "marketplace" where multiple types of digital assets may be exchanged. As each blockchain is designed to support specific types of assets and transactions, and no blockchain will prevail, the need to perform interblockchain transactions is already pressing.
In this work we examine the fundamental problem of interoperable and interconnected blockchains. In particular, we begin by introducing the Multi-Distributed Ledger Objects (MDLO), which is the result of aggregating multiple Distributed Ledger Objects - DLO (a DLO is a formalization of the blockchain) and that supports append and get operations of records (e.g., transactions) in them from multiple clients concurrently. Next we define the AtomicAppends problem, which emerges when the exchange of digital assets between multiple clients may involve appending records in more than one DLO. Specifically, AtomicAppend requires that either all records will be appended on the involved DLOs or none. We examine the solvability of this problem assuming rational and risk-averse clients that may fail by crashing, and under different client utility and append models, timing models, and client failure scenarios. We show that for some cases the existence of an intermediary is necessary for the problem solution. We propose the implementation of such intermediary over a specialized blockchain, we term Smart DLO (SDLO), and we show how this can be used to solve the AtomicAppends problem even in an asynchronous, client competitive environment, where all the clients may crash
Distributed Partitioned Big-Data Optimization via Asynchronous Dual Decomposition
In this paper we consider a novel partitioned framework for distributed
optimization in peer-to-peer networks. In several important applications the
agents of a network have to solve an optimization problem with two key
features: (i) the dimension of the decision variable depends on the network
size, and (ii) cost function and constraints have a sparsity structure related
to the communication graph. For this class of problems a straightforward
application of existing consensus methods would show two inefficiencies: poor
scalability and redundancy of shared information. We propose an asynchronous
distributed algorithm, based on dual decomposition and coordinate methods, to
solve partitioned optimization problems. We show that, by exploiting the
problem structure, the solution can be partitioned among the nodes, so that
each node just stores a local copy of a portion of the decision variable
(rather than a copy of the entire decision vector) and solves a small-scale
local problem
A randomized primal distributed algorithm for partitioned and big-data non-convex optimization
In this paper we consider a distributed optimization scenario in which the
aggregate objective function to minimize is partitioned, big-data and possibly
non-convex. Specifically, we focus on a set-up in which the dimension of the
decision variable depends on the network size as well as the number of local
functions, but each local function handled by a node depends only on a (small)
portion of the entire optimization variable. This problem set-up has been shown
to appear in many interesting network application scenarios. As main paper
contribution, we develop a simple, primal distributed algorithm to solve the
optimization problem, based on a randomized descent approach, which works under
asynchronous gossip communication. We prove that the proposed asynchronous
algorithm is a proper, ad-hoc version of a coordinate descent method and thus
converges to a stationary point. To show the effectiveness of the proposed
algorithm, we also present numerical simulations on a non-convex quadratic
program, which confirm the theoretical results
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