Blockchain-based Applications Research Articles

Resource Selection from Edge-Cloud for IIoT and Blockchain-Based Applications in Industry 4.0/5.0

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is attempting to integrate the real world into the digital world through smart devices, information technology, and Internet. IIoT is connecting enormous devices in industry 4.0/5.0 which may be heterogeneous in nature. With the evolution of IoT, diverse technologies have been employed to deliver the quality of services to the end users in a seamless manner. Cloud computing has considerably boosted the growth of IIoT by serving the computational and data storage needs of IIoT- and blockchain-based applications in industry 4.0/5.0. However, cloud is providing services to IIoT users, but still, there is a need to improve the latency rate of delivery of services, the transmission rate of end-to-end delivery, and overall throughput of the network channels in industry 4.0 and blockchain-based distributed systems. The cloud servers those are located at remote locations are not capable to offer the quality of services to users who require real-time responses, minimum network latency, and optimum throughput. The advancements in Edge computing are making Edge-Cloud more suitable for end users in blockchain-based transactions and industry 4.0 to serve the requirements of IIoT-based applications. This paper aims at providing the resources of Edge-Cloud to the end users by proposing a soft-computing technique for selecting the most suitable resources from the pool of available resources at Edge-Cloud. This paper is proposing a multicriteria statistical approach for resource selection to exploit the benefits of Edge-Cloud and to suffice the needs of IIoT and blockchain-based applications in industry 4.0. The results obtained from the proposed research assist in enhancing the service providing rate, minimizing the delay in transmission, and optimizing the throughput of Edge-Cloud servers.

Blockchain Applications in Forestry: A Systematic Literature Review

Blockchain applications have received a lot of attention in recent years. They provide enormous benefits and advantages to many different sectors. To date, there have not been any systematic studies comprehensively reviewing current blockchain-based applications in the forestry sector. This paper examines published work on blockchain-based applications in the forestry sector. A systematic review was conducted to identify, analyze, and discuss current literature on current blockchain applications deployed (and/or proposed) in the forestry sector, grouping results into three domains of forest management, traceability of forest-based products, and forest fire detection based on content analysis. The analyses highlight reported benefits, opportunities, and challenges of blockchain applications in the forestry sector. The study results show that blockchain has great potential in sustainable forestry, minimizing illegal logging, conserving biodiversity, and many other areas in forestry. It also shows that blockchain in forestry is still immature and complex, since it requires specialists to adopt. This paper contributes towards filling the existing research gap through this systematic review on blockchain applications in forestry. This review offers insights into a deep understanding of blockchain applications for managers, practitioners, and consultants interested in forestry. The paper identifies existing research gaps on related topics of blockchain applications in forestry and makes recommendations on potential future directions for research into blockchain in forestry.

Innovative Way of Using AI and ML to Create and Audit Crypto Token Smart Contract Addresses in Any Block chain

It can be noted that cryptocurrencies have gained huge popularity in recent years and blockchain technology is serving as the backbone of this digital revolution. Due to the increase in technology, the demand for cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based applications continues to grow. Therefore, there is a need for secure and reliable smart contracts. Based on these points, the article will show some innovative ways to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to create and audit crypto token contracts and provide information on different blockchain platforms. with the comprehensive literature review and explanation of how machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques can be used to enhance the security and efficiency of crypto token contract address management.

Enrolling into exclusion: African blockchain and decolonial ambitions in an evolving finance/security infrastructure

ABSTRACT There is growing debate over whether applications of blockchain and other financial technologies (‘fintechs’) reinforce forms of neo-colonial extraction that perpetuate North–South inequities or help enact decolonial ambitions across the Global South. This paper expands such discussions and contributes to this special issue on ‘fintech in Africa’ by situating emerging African blockchain techno-experimentation within wider international infrastructural relations. We argue that blockchain-based activities in and across the African continent must be understood within those also unfolding in countries that have been subjected to financial sanctions of varying types (China, Iran, Russia, Venezuela) by the European Union, United States, and United Nations. Our analysis traces how blockchain-based applications by sanctioned countries are extending exclusions in novel and existing socio-technical relations. We conclude that blockchain-based experiments are facilitating rather than displacing a colonial finance/security infrastructure.

Benefits and concerns associated with blockchain-based health information exchange (HIE): a qualitative study from physicians' perspectives

BackgroundBlockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize information sharing in companies. Many studies suggest using blockchain-powered platforms to replace existing mechanisms for health information exchange (HIE) across healthcare organizations. However, very few blockchain-based projects have been implemented in the healthcare sector. This study takes a qualitative approach to explore benefits, concerns, and barriers to the rollout of blockchain in HIE projects from physicians' perspectives.MethodsThe Promoting Action on Research Implementation in Health Services (PARIHS) framework was used to help us better understand root causes, existing problems, perceived risks, perceived benefits, and suggestions. In-depth interviews have been conducted with 38 physicians in six months. The data were analyzed and coded using NVIVO to classify conceptually similar themes mentioned by the interviewees.ResultsIn total, seven themes have been identified. The key benefits are categorized into three themes: innovative technological features, collaborative ecosystem, and system performance. The main concerns and risks are categorized into four themes: individual, organizational, technological, and market-related issues. The findings can contribute to knowledge by highlighting key values expected from blockchain technology in HIEs. The results also explore obstacles to leveraging the blockchain in healthcare from the perspectives of an important stakeholder (physicians).ConclusionsThe results show that although blockchain technology may create several benefits (e.g., innovative technological features, collaborative ecosystem, and system performance), its applications in healthcare are still in their early stages. The perceptions of the individual issues (e.g., lack of knowledge), organizational issues (e.g., implementation issues), technological issues (e.g., blockchain model types), and market-related issues (e.g., regulatory concerns) indicate that blockchain-based applications in healthcare continue to be an emerging field. This study has practical implications as understanding these concerns can help developers and healthcare managers identify potential issues in the planning, developing, and implementing blockchain-based HIE systems. Addressing these barriers would support the widespread use of blockchain-based HIEs in different healthcare settings and facilitate interoperability and connectivity in regional and community health information networks.

Call for Special Issue Papers: Sustainable Solutions for Internet of Things Using Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain in Future Networks

The world is undergoing a thoughtful revolution with the arrival of the intelligent information era. The central realms accompanying smart living such as transportation, entertainment, healthcare and smart cities are projected to improve service quality assuring a high-end user experience. Future mobile networks are projected to foster the future of ubiquitously connected data-intensive intelligent society powered with complete automation by seamless integrating of all sorts of wireless networks spread over the ground, underwater, air and space. This special issue aims to bring together foremost researchers in academia and engineering from various backgrounds to disseminate to the technical community an outline of emerging technologies, advanced architectures, challenges, open issues and future directions of modern networks in artificial intelligence, internet of things, and blockchain-based applications.

Drones’ Edge Intelligence Over Smart Environments in B5G: Blockchain and Federated Learning Synergy

Edge Intelligence is an emerging technology which has attracted significant attention. It applies Artificial Intelligence (AI) closer to the network edge for supporting Beyond fifth Generation (B5G) needs. On the other hand, drones can be used as relay station (mobile drone edge intelligence) to gather data from smart environments. Federated Learning (FL) enables the drones to perform decentralized collaborative learning by developing local models, sharing the model parameters with neighbors and the centralized unit to improve global model accuracy in smart environments. However, drone edge intelligence faces challenges such as security and decentralization management, limiting its functions to support green smart environments. Blockchain is a promising technology that enables privacy-preserving data sharing in a distributed manner. There are several challenges that still need to be addressed in blockchain-based applications, such as scalability, energy efficiency, and transaction capacity. Motivated by the significance of FL and blockchain, this survey focuses on the synergy of FL and blockchain to enable drone edge intelligence for green sustainable environments. Moreover, we discuss the combination of FL and blockchain technological aspects, motivation, and framework for green smart environments. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities, and future trends in this domain.

RETRACTED: Blockchain technology in the future of healthcare

The overarching vision of Blockchain technology for the future would be to address many problems affecting the Healthcare industry today with the creation of a shared archive of health-related information for physicians and patients independent of their electronic diagnosis, improving safety and secrecy, investing fewer resources on the medical staff and more money on patient care. It is only the beginning of what is likely that a Blockchain movement has come out of cryptocurrency and has made its path to the medical industry. Within the sense of intelligent health, Blockchain could have distinctive benefits from a context-aware viewpoint, especially where people and society as a whole can profit from effective and customised solutions. In this paper, we discuss numerous use cases of Blockchain in the healthcare industry. The symbiotic relationship between Blockchain and intelligent health is discussed. Additionally, we address many obstacles for integrating Blockchain-based applications in the health sector and several future research prospects.

Blockchain Use Cases Against Climate Destruction

Based on the current measures, it is unlikely that the targets of the Paris Agreement on climate change are to be achieved within the given time. Therefore, new solutions are needed to get climate change under control. Emerging technologies like blockchain allow for new ways to approach climate change. The blockchain serves only as an enabling technology for cryptocurrencies but is a stand-alone tool applicable for various purposes. This paper aims to shed light on the overlap between the areas of blockchain and climate change. Research in this area was examined for potential blockchain use cases to support climate action using a systematic literature review. The found applications can be grouped into the main categories of Emissions Trading and Green Certificates, Sustainable Energy, Sustainable Mobility, and Green Financing. Within these applications, blockchains are being used as supporting technology. Especially transparency, traceability, and immutability are particularly beneficial in blockchain-based applications against climate change. As a downside of the technology, controversial aspects of the blockchain are considered as the energy consumption of the technology.

Block size optimization for PoW consensus algorithm based blockchain applications by using whale optimization algorithm

Blockchain-based applications come up with cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin, introducing a distributed ledger technologies for peer-to-peer networks and essentially records the transactions in blocks containing hash value of the previous blocks. Block generation constitutes the basis of this technology, and the optimization of such systems is among the most crucial concerns. Determining either the block size or the number of transactions in the block brings out a remarkable problem that has been solved by the miners in recent years. First, higher block size results in higher transaction time, on the other hand, smaller block size has many disadvantages such as security, lower transaction fees, lower transaction numbers in a given time interval, which makes it unable to compete with other currency systems due to this bulky structure and higher block generation time. In this study, multiobjective optimization problem (OP) is proposed by minimizing block generation and transmission time. This multiobjective OP is transformed into a single OP by applying weighted sum method. To determine the optimal block size, particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and whale optimization evolutionary algorithm (WOA) are employed. Although both algorithms have capability to reach optimum block size and corresponding time, WOA achieves better performance than PSO in terms of the convergence speed and output fluctuation. Moreover, analysis of the prediction of optimum block size is carried out under different weights which creates many optimization functions. Experimental results indicate that if higher weight is assigned to the transmission time, then block size decreases sharply. Furthermore, the experimental results reveal that design of the blockchain network and number of nodes in network profoundly affect the block size selection due to the time constraints.

BlockProof: A Framework for Verifying Authenticity and Integrity of Web Content.

In the Literature, we can find several research works to help in the digital crime fight in order to prove integrity and authenticity of a published document, image or video. Among all the crimes, fake news certainly is among the most recurrent ones and needs to be mitigated. There are several Blockchain-based applications in order to make use of the benefits derived from technology, but little is found to verify the authenticity of Web content records as well as the history of all updates that have taken place in each Web content. Such kind of solution has become important nowadays as a way to cover the gap in the combat against fake news, for example. The purpose of this paper is to present BlockProof, a framework for verifying web content authenticity and integrity that offers a solution for content providers to register Web content, regardless of whether the page has dynamic or static content, in addition to enabling the consultation of the history of all records made for a given URL. We understand that such kind of solution may be useful to data producers/providers to provide evidence that they are in compliance with the fight against fake news, for instance.

Empirical Performance Analysis of Hyperledger LTS for Small and Medium Enterprises.

The massive success of blockchain technology in Bitcoin is taking the world by storm by attracting vast acceptance from both the public and private sectors. Blockchain allows digital transactions between two parties without a third party as a broker. Blockchain is now applicable beyond fintech to various other industries. Among these, Hyperledger fabric has emerged as the most popular blockchain-based open-source permissioned platform targeting business applications. It has been used in over 400 proofs-of-concept blockchain and is well proven in applications, such as supply chain, healthcare, and so on. Despite the many obvious benefits observed in blockchain-enhanced platforms, there still exist technical challenges in scalability, causing performance deficiency, which includes latency and throughput. There is an exigent need to improve the current blockchain-based applications to have the blockchain nodes be scalable without compromising the blockchain performance. In this study, we present the impact of workload variance of up to 1000 transactions with the setup of 20 blockchain nodes in the Hyperledger LTS platform. The evaluation metrics are transaction success and failure rate, throughput, and latency in the blockchain. The transaction throughput was found to be consistent with the increasing workload on a constant number of nodes. However, it showed a declining trend with an increasing number of nodes. As far as the latency, it was in tandem with the increased workload and the number of nodes. We, therefore, conclude that the LTS version is suitable for small and medium enterprises that do not scale up.

The Utility of Blockchain Technology in the Electronic Commerce of Tourism Services: An Exploratory Study on Romanian Consumers

Blockchain technology is considered one of the most revolutionary innovations that has much to offer the tourism industry, having a positive impact among consumers with the help of interactive applications but also easy to use. Tourist services must constantly evolve in a society where the consumer has everything a click away and his requirements are demanding when it comes to quality leisure. Blockchain technology has the power to change the course of the travel experience, offering the customer more autonomy, but the applications developed by the providers can offer transparency and trust to the customers from the moment T0, when the desire to go on a trip is born, until the end at which it should provide feedback. So far, digital and tourism specialists have not agreed on the development of blockchain-based applications, although the benefits are great for both consumers and tourism service providers, as in this publication we can see a series of advantages that blockchain technology can offer the tourism field. This paper also investigates the satisfaction that the Romanian consumer has after purchasing tourist services through e-commerce applications, a satisfaction that can be an additional motivation for specialists to implement blockchain technology. Following the research in this paper, it can be seen how important it is to develop a series of easy-to-use applications, because if the consumer does not manage to use the applications, this affects the degree of satisfaction and the intention to continue using the online applications for the purchase of tourism services.

Ontological Representation of Healthcare Application Security Using Blockchain Technology

Blockchain is gaining traction for improving the security of healthcare applications, however, it does not become a silver bullet as various security threats are observed in blockchain-based applications. Moreover, when performing the security risk management (SRM) of blockchain-based applications, there are conceptual ambiguities and semantic gaps that hinder from treating the security threats effectively. To address these issues, we present a blockchain-based healthcare security ontology (HealthOnt) that offers coherent and formal information models to treat security threats of traditional and blockchain-based applications. We evaluate the ontology by performing the SRM of a back-pain patient’s healthcare application case. The results show that HealthOnt can support the iterative process of SRM and can be continually updated when new security threats, vulnerabilities, or countermeasures emerge. In addition, the HealthOnt may assist in the modelling and analysis of real-world situations while addressing important security concerns from the perspective of stakeholders. This work can help blockchain developers, practitioners, and other associated stakeholders to develop secure blockchain-based healthcare applications in the early stages.

An integrative model of trust toward crypto-tokens applications: A customer perspective approach

Trust is a key driver of consumers' acceptance and adoption of innovations. The purpose of the paper is to explore and understand the factors that facilitate the creation of trust in crypto-tokens decentralized applications (DApp) from the perspective of the consumer. A qualitative research design has been used and forty-five participants were interviewed for the study. Based on a theory-driven approach of qualitative data analysis, a multidimensional, holistic conceptual framework of trust has been proposed. The model captures the core categories that affect consumer's trust toward crypto-tokens applications. It highlights the need to understand the individual, technological, environmental and use-case features which shape the way blockchain-based applications can be trusted. The framework can be used by policymakers, educators, exchange platforms, DApp developers, and entrepreneurs to develop strategies that cultivate on the drivers of trust, and create value with crypto-tokens and Web3.0 economies. Higher trust ultimately promotes acceptance and adoption of blockchain applications.

A Patient-Centric Healthcare Framework Reference Architecture for Better Semantic Interoperability Based on Blockchain, Cloud, and IoT

Due to the distributed and non-integrated nature of the healthcare systems which results from the application-centric view it leads to a challenging task to manage healthcare data exchange (heterogeneity problem). On the other hand, Blockchain technologies are emerging as promising and cost-effective means to meet some of these requirements due to their inherent design properties, such as secure cryptography and a resilient peer-to-peer network. Likewise, Blockchain-based applications can benefit the healthcare domain via their properties of asset sharing, and audit trails of data access. Existing work mainly pays attention to centralized and blockchain-based mechanisms. But it doesn’t realize the increase need for better data interoperability amount multiple healthcare systems and services. This requires shifting from the application-centric solutions toward the patient-centric solutions. This paper presents A secure and efficient framework based on Blockchain, Cloud, and IoT named Patient-Centric Healthcare Framework (PCH) for better healthcare systems interoperability. A tiered-based architecture (5 tiers) with collaboration is designed for the feasible realization of PCH. Also, the design and implementation aspects start from the layering diagram, system context, and detailed reference architecture that emphasizes the detailed component topology and interactions within the framework. An electronic medical record is used to show how healthcare data is processed with the required security considerations. Then, an evaluation of PCH against the existing Blockchain-based healthcare frameworks is conducted. The results analysis demonstrates that PCH offers practical solutions to protect healthcare data and support efficient data sharing with better interoperability.

The impact of network delay on Nakamoto consensus mechanism

<abstract><p>Nakamoto consensus is prevailing in the world largest blockchain-based cryptocurrency systems, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Since then, various attempts have been studied to attack Nakamoto consensus worldwide. In recent years, network delay has won more attention for making inconsistent ledgers in blockchain-based applications by virtue of attacking Nakamoto consensus. However, so far as we know, most of the existing works mainly focus on constructing inconsistent ledgers for blockchain systems, but not offering fine-grained theoretical analysis for how to optimize the success probability by flexibly dividing computational power and network delay from the viewpoint of adversary. The paper first utilizes network delay and the partition of controlled computation power of honest miners for making forks as long as possible. Then, formally analysis is provided to show the success probability of the proposed attack, and compute the optimal network delay and splitting for adversarial computation power in theory. Finally, simulation experiments validate the correctness of the formal analysis.</p></abstract>

A Systematic Review of Blockchain Applications

For this study, the researchers conducted a systematic literature review to answer complex questions about the field of blockchain technology. We used an unbiased systematic review process to find works on blockchain-based applications and developed a Python code that searched various online databases. This paper provides an overview of the characteristics, mode of operation, and applications of blockchains in various domains such as transportation, commerce and industry, privacy and security, the financial sector, government, education, healthcare, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The aim was to identify the key research themes addressed in existing articles within each application domain and suggest future research directions for these domains. We analyzed a set of 750 articles published between 2015 and 2021 that dealt with blockchain applications. We found that financial management and security issues have been the main research focus since 2015. However, the use of blockchain in education has become a central research theme in 2021. Healthcare, IoT, and government applications have also grown in popularity. We furthermore analyzed some of the implementations of privacy mechanisms, as well as the challenges and future directions that need to be addressed for effective blockchain deployment. This study contributes to existing research by providing a comprehensive overview of blockchain application themes and their emerging areas for stakeholders in diverse sectors.

Impact of Blockchain technology in Healthcare

The current healthcare systems are facing many issues in terms of data management, data sharing, information security and patient privacy, data immutability, trust, and transparency. In addition, the multiple existing healthcare systems are centralized which complicates the healthcare professionals, patients in managing their data and causes several problems. Blockchain technology as a decentralized peer-to-peer network has the power to digitalize and transform the manner that the data are managed in the healthcare industry, in this regard, is one such domain that might benefit from Blockchain technology in different manners. This paper aims to improve a review of recent works on Blockchain-based healthcare applications.

CTB-PKI: Clustering and Trust Enabled Blockchain Based PKI System for Efficient Communication in P2P Network

The decentralization feature of public and private blockchain-based applications is achieved by selecting different nodes as validator or Certificate Authority ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CA</i> ) for each transaction. Public blockchain uses Proof of Work (PoW) to search for the validator. PoW causes an enormous amount of energy. Therefore, Proof of Stake ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">PoS</i> ), and Proof of Authority ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">PoA</i> ) emerged as alternate solutions. Selection of a new <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CA</i> using <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">PoS</i> or <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">PoA</i> algorithms for each transaction may improve transaction security. However, a network may have a large number of transactions, and selecting a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CA</i> for each transaction using <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">PoS</i> or <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">PoA</i> may cause a significant amount of block propagation delay. Moreover, an increase in the number of participant nodes may increase the block propagation delay even further. Therefore, higher block propagation delay reduces network efficiency drastically. This paper proposes a different approach to increase the efficiency of Blockchain-based Public Key Infrastructure ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">BC – PKI</i> ). The proposed approach creates clusters of participant nodes based on their validation time, response time, and trust. This method selects a cluster based on the budget of response time and validation time given by the node that intends to start a transaction. Thereafter, the node which has the highest trust in that cluster is chosen as a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CA</i> for the next transaction. Instead of searching on all participant nodes, our approach searches on the nodes of the chosen cluster which reduces the searching space of the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CA</i> selection process. This research work adopts a trust evaluation approach where the trust factor is quantified based on its experience and reputation. The node trust is reevaluated after every successful and unsuccessful transaction. A node that performs more successful transactions has more trust value. The node that has a higher trust value has a higher probability to be selected as a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CA</i> for a transaction. The trust reevaluation process is followed by the clustering process. The result shows the proposed approach can reduce ~38.5% response time and ~2.2% validation time as compared to infrastructure which does not implement clustering. Additionally, the proposed <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CTB – PKI</i> can be used in Blockchain 2.0 and Blockchain 3.0-related applications.