41 research outputs found
Analysis of the Communication Traffic for Blockchain Synchronization of IoT Devices
Blockchain is a technology uniquely suited to support massive number of
transactions and smart contracts within the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem,
thanks to the decentralized accounting mechanism. In a blockchain network, the
states of the accounts are stored and updated by the validator nodes,
interconnected in a peer-to-peer fashion. IoT devices are characterized by
relatively low computing capabilities and low power consumption, as well as
sporadic and low-bandwidth wireless connectivity. An IoT device connects to one
or more validator nodes to observe or modify the state of the accounts. In
order to interact with the most recent state of accounts, a device needs to be
synchronized with the blockchain copy stored by the validator nodes. In this
work, we describe general architectures and synchronization protocols that
enable synchronization of the IoT endpoints to the blockchain, with different
communication costs and security levels. We model and analytically characterize
the traffic generated by the synchronization protocols, and also investigate
the power consumption and synchronization trade-off via numerical simulations.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that rigorously models
the role of wireless connectivity in blockchain-powered IoT systems.Comment: Paper accepted at IEEE International Conference on Communications
(ICC) 201
On the Impact of Wireless Jamming on the Distributed Secondary Microgrid Control
The secondary control in direct current microgrids (MGs) is used to restore
the voltage deviations caused by the primary droop control, where the latter is
implemented locally in each distributed generator and reacts to load
variations. Numerous recent works propose to implement the secondary control in
a distributed fashion, relying on a communication system to achieve consensus
among MG units. This paper shows that, if the system is not designed to cope
with adversary communication impairments, then a malicious attacker can apply a
simple jamming of a few units of the MG and thus compromise the secondary MG
control. Compared to other denial-of-service attacks that are oriented against
the tertiary control, such as economic dispatch, the attack on the secondary
control presented here can be more severe, as it disrupts the basic
functionality of the MG