Towards an Approach for Validating the Internet-of-Transactional-Things

© 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. This paper examines the impact of transactional properties, known as pivot, retriable, and compensatable, on Internet-of-Things (IoT). Despite the ever-growing number of things in today’s cyber-physical world, a limited number of studies examine this impact while considering things’ particularities in terms of reduced size, restricted connectivity, continuous mobility, limited energy, and constrained storage. To address this gap, this paper proceeds first, with exposing things’ duties, namely sensing, actuating, and communicating. Then, it examines the appropriateness of each transactional property for each duty. During the performance of transactional things, (semi)-atomicity criterion is adopted allowing to approve when these things’ duties could be either canceled or compensated. A system that runs a set of what-if experiments is presented in the paper allowing to demonstrate the technical doability of transactional things

A secure and scalable IoT consensus protocol

Several consensus algorithms have been proposed as a way of resolving the Byzantine General problem with respect to blockchain consensus process. However, when these consensus algorithms are applied to a distributed, asynchronous network some suffer with security and/or scalability issues, while others suffer with liveness and/or safety issues. This is because the majority of research have not considered the importance of liveness and safety, with respect to the integrity of the consensus decision. In this paper a novel solution to this challenge is presented. A solution that protects blockchain transactions from fraudulent or erroneous mis-spends. This consensus protocol uses a combination of probabilistic randomness, an isomorphic balance authentication, error detection and synchronised time restrictions, when assessing the authenticity and validity of IoT request. Designed to operate in a distributed asynchronous network, this approach increases scalability while maintaining a high transactional throughput, even when faced with Byzantine failure

Blockchain to Rule the Waves - Nascent Design Principles for Reducing Risk and Uncertainty in Decentralized Environments

Many decentralized, inter-organizational environments such as supply chains are characterized by high transactional uncertainty and risk. At the same time, blockchain technology promises to mitigate these issues by introducing certainty into economic transactions. This paper discusses the findings of a Design Science Research project involving the construction and evaluation of an information technology artifact in collaboration with Maersk, a leading international shipping company, where central documents in shipping, such as the Bill of Lading, are turned into a smart contract on blockchain. Based on our insights from the project, we provide first evidence for preliminary design principles for applications that aim to mitigate the transactional risk and uncertainty in decentralized environments using blockchain. Both the artifact and the first evidence for emerging design principles are novel, contributing to the discourse on the implications that the advent of blockchain technology poses for governing economic activity