Open-source Blockchain Research Articles

A Blockchain-based Digital Twin for IoT deployments in logistics and transportation

Digital Twins are software technologies that enable the modelling of real-world phenomena in digitised environments, representing and monitoring the reality of various processes, including IoT deployments. Since 2017, the use of Digital Twins has been increasing. However, in the road transport and logistics realm, the adoption rate remains low, primarily due to the costs of processing and validating data in centralised scenarios, among other factors. On the other hand, Blockchain technologies were created to provide immutable and decentralised data storage in diverse scenarios, adding a layer of isolation and reliability in heterogeneous solutions. This paper presents a case study proposing a Digital Twin based on open-source Blockchain technologies, such as FIWARE Canis Major. The primary goal is to design and implement a robust and efficient open-source architecture that allows for the control and optimisation of vehicle fleet allocations in logistics/transport companies within supply chain management. This case study aims to showcase the practical application of the proposed solution in a real-world context, providing insights into its eco-friendly and low-cost attributes while opening the door to a large number of additional applications.

Zero Trust-Based Blockchain Based IoT Security with Consensus and Access Control Framework

As the Internet and computer technology develop, more gadgets are linked wirelessly, expanding the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT is a huge network of sensors and gateways that links them. IoT devices generate images, music, video, digital signals, and more by interacting with their surroundings. To exchange resources and information, all IoT equipment and apps may connect to the Internet. Everything is connected in our world. Due to the broad deployment and massive size of IoT devices, access control of device resources is problematic. Obtaining IoT device resources unlawfully will have major implications since they include personal and sensitive information. Many systems and situations employ access control technologies to secure resources. Discriminatory, identity-based, and MAC access control schemes are traditional (mandatory access control). However, these centralized methods have single-point failure, scalability issues, poor dependability, and low throughput. IoT devices may belong to several organizations or people, be mobile, and function badly, making centralized access management problematic. Another innovative data management solution is blockchain, which uses distributed storage to stabilize data. A transaction writes the data reading or modification record into a block, and the blocks are connected as a chain using a hash to maintain data integrity. It synchronizes data between nodes via a peer-to-peer network and consensus process, assuring data consistency for blockchain network participants. Zero Trust-Based Blockchain, an open source blockchain development platform, offers more efficient consensus methods, larger throughputs, smart contracts, and support for different organizations and ledgers. Proposed work build the fabric-IoT access control system using Zero Trust-Based Blockchain to apply blockchain technology to IoT access control in this study. Distributed processing and storage for IoT data may solve these critical issues with blockchain. Thus, developing distributed IoT-based e-healthcare services using blockchain technology may have been feasible. FabricIoT can keep records, handle dynamic access control, and solve the IoT access control problem using distributed architecture.

Investigation on Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Open-Source Blockchain Projects

Technical debt refers to decisions made during the design and development of software that postpone the resolution of technical problems or the enhancement of the software’s features to a later date. If not properly managed, technical debt can put long-term software quality and maintainability at risk. Self-admitted technical debt is defined as the addition of specific comments to source code as a result of conscious and deliberate decisions to accumulate technical debt. In this paper, we will look at the presence of self-admitted technical debt in open-source blockchain projects, which are characterized by the use of a relatively novel technology and the need to generate trust. The self-admitted technical debt was analyzed using NLP techniques for the classification of comments extracted from the source code of ten projects chosen based on capitalization and popularity. The analysis of self-admitted technical debt in blockchain projects was compared with the results of previous non-blockchain open-source project analyses. The findings show that self-admitted design technical debt outnumbers requirement technical debt in blockchain projects. The analysis discovered that some projects had a low percentage of self-admitted technical debt in the comments but a high percentage of source code files with debt. In addition, self-admitted technical debt is on average more prevalent in blockchain projects and more equally distributed than in reference Java projects.If not managed, the relatively high presence of detected technical debt in blockchain projects could represent a threat to the needed trust between the blockchain system and the users. Blockchain projects development teams could benefit from self-admitted technical debt detection for targeted technical debt management.

Online Voting System Using Block Chain

Abstract: New opportunities to create new kinds of digital services are being provided by blockchain. Although research on the subject is still in its early stages, it has largely concentrated on the technical and legal issues rather than making use of this novel idea and developing advanced digital services. In order to develop a new electronic voting system that could be used in local or national elections, we will make use of the open source Blockchain technology. The Blockchain-based system will be safe, dependable, and anonymous, and it will contribute to a rise in voter turnout and public confidence in their governments. In order to be accessible to voters while being guarded against outside influences preventing votes from being cast or preventing a voter's ballot from being tampered with, an e-Voting system must have enhanced security

Disaster Recovery Backup and Privacy Protection Algorithm of Hotel HRM Information System

In this study, a high-star hotel is used as a case to study the impact of informatization on hotel human resource management. For the hotel human management system data with many types, large quantities and high security requirements, the data disaster recovery backup should have scalability and privacy protection. The results show that: First, from an overall point of view, the current human resource management in the hotel industry has fully entered the information age, and the overall trend will continue. Secondly, in terms of specific applications such as recruitment management, training management, personnel management, etc., combining it with cryptographic technologies such as AONT and threshold secret sharing, a new power data disaster recovery backup scheme is proposed, which is implemented on the open source blockchain platform.

Blockchain-Assisted Personalized Car Insurance With Privacy Preservation and Fraud Resistance

It is well known that auto insurance companies (ICs) use personalized car insurance (PCI) to continuously track drivers' behavior to determine their auto premiums. However, drivers inevitably have concerns about the transparency of data collection/processing and the potential privacy leakage. In this paper, we propose a new PCI scheme to achieve privacy preservation and transparency with the assistance of a consortium blockchain. Specifically, a blockchain is first established by a group of consortium members, and each IC can deploy insurance contracts on the blockchain to support public verification of data collection/processing and thus fulfill the transparency requirement. Then a verifiable and privacy-preserving driving behavior evaluation protocol is designed by tailoring partially homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proof techniques. Drivers can use the protocol to interact with ICs through the contracts, and ICs can learn drivers' behavior and set corresponding auto premiums by analyzing encrypted driving data. Furthermore, a third-party auditor (TPA) is authorized by drivers and ICs to audit encrypted driving data on the contracts and resist fraud attacks. We model the contract-based auditing as a recursive inspection game where TPA can minimize the number of audits to detect data fraud and penalize malicious drivers according to Nash equilibrium. Therefore, the proposed PCI scheme can guarantee that most of the collected driving data are not biased. Formal simulation-based security analysis is given to prove the security of the proposed scheme, and a proof-of-concept prototype is also developed on an open-source blockchain to demonstrate the feasibility.

Privacy protected product differentiation through smart contracts based on bilateral negotiations in peer-to-peer transactive energy markets

Local peer-to-peer (P2P) energy markets have decentralized nature with bilateral negotiations and possibility of product differentiation to respect market participants’ preferences for attributes such as energy source. An extension is presented for a Transactive Energy based decentralized P2P market framework to support product differentiation along with a Hyperledger Fabric (HPLF) open-source blockchain network integration to enable secure P2P energy transactions while maintaining distribution line power flow limits. HPLF is chosen as its permissioned nature enables recording of higher number of transactions per second compared to famous blockchain ledgers such as Bitcoin. There is a need to protect the transaction details while recording on common blockchain ledger as the same buyer may be offering different energy rates to different sellers. Market clearing logic is encoded into smart contracts and a novel smart contract approach is proposed that serves dual purpose. First, it automatically verifies the negotiated energy prices and quantities among buyer–seller pair to validate transactions. Second, it records verified market transactions on common immutable blockchain using private data stores without exposing the transaction details while maintaining verifiability. Numerical co-simulation studies with standard HPLF integration show that participants can inherently align their bidding strategies to suit their product differentiation preferences such as higher prices for renewable energy producers (REPs). Detailed results describing the recording of energy transaction on HPLF ledger as transfer of virtual asset are included to demonstrate operation of proposed smart contract. Further, multi-step market clearing results show that the revenue for such REPs can be increased significantly.

A Blockchain-Enabled Demand Management and Control Framework Driven by Deep Reinforcement Learning

The rapid development of Internet-of-Things in smart grid has enabled millions of grid-connected distributed controllable resources (DCR; e.g., electric vehicles, controllable loads) to provide service to the grid, such as frequency regulation and demand response. The integration of these DCRs may become a large virtual power plant network with various characteristics. This poses great challenges from both control and management perspectives, e.g., computation/communication burden, optimization complexity, scalability limitation, prosumer privacy, etc. In this article, we propose an effective autonomous incentive-based DCR control and management framework to integrate a large amount of DCRs to provide grid services, which simultaneously provides accurate active power adjustment to the grid, optimizes DCR allocations, and maximizes the profits for all prosumers and system operators. A model-free deep deterministic policy gradient-based method is designed to find the optimal incentives in a continuous action space to encourage prosumers to adjust their power consumptions. The method is implemented in a consortium open-source blockchain platform, Hyperledger Fabric, which facilitates controls and transaction management. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework, extensive experimental studies are conducted using real-world data.

Blockchain for Dynamic Spectrum Access and Network Slicing: A Review

Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) and network slicing are some of the principal concepts to realize the emerging applications in Beyond 5th Generation (B5G) and 6th Generation (6G) networks. The frequency spectrum remains scarce and underutilized, while the performance requirements in terms of data throughput and latency of the network tenants have diversified. DSA allows for the efficient utilization of spectrum resources, while network slicing aims to serve network users with highly distinctive service needs. Lack of incentivization, sharing of spectrum resources among multiple operators, and lack of trust between operators are some of the challenges faced by centralized DSA approaches. Similarly, secure network slice orchestration, slice-isolation, secure access to network resources, privacy of user sensitive data, assuring the provision of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), are some of the challenges in existing network slicing techniques. Blockchain due to its innate capabilities can be a promising technology to solve the key issues pertaining to current DSA and network slicing approaches. Blockchain through smart contracts, provides traceability of network resources, auditability and accountability of network operators and service providers. Smart contracts facilitate the automation of resource sharing and network slice orchestration, while ensuring that SLAs are met, and network operators are compensated. This paper first provides a comprehensive overview of the DSA concept, the existing DSA techniques, and the challenges posed by these techniques. This is followed by a detailed description of network slicing, its key elements and architecture, various network slicing parameters, existing network slicing techniques and their challenges. Then an in- depth review on blockchain, its working principle, factors that affect blockchain implementation, and a comparison of various open-source blockchain platforms that support smart contracts is presented. This discussion is summarized by presenting the state-of-the-art in the blockchain-enabled DSA and network slicing, challenges and trade-offs of these techniques, and the gaps and future directions in this research area. Finally, we conclude by providing some future research directions.

A review of the key challenges of non-fungible tokens

The nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace spiked in the recent past. The concept originated initially as a token standard of Ethereum, an open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality, where each token is characterized by distinguishable signs. These types of tokens have unique digital properties that allow their distinct identification. NFTs, with their distinct qualities, can be fluidly traded with customized values according to their ages, rarity, and liquidity. The trading of NFTs has heavily influenced the growth of the decentralized application (dApp) marketplace, as exponential returns (thousand folds from their original value) on its ever-expanding market are being observed, leading to worldwide attention. However, the NFT ecosystem is in its nascence, and the associated technologies are still in their infancy. New researchers might be fascinated with the exponential, yet nebulous evolution of NFTs; however, this novelty has contributed to the paucity of systematic and conclusive published research work on this topic. This review portrays the NFT ecosystem multidimensionally, wherein the paper commences with an overview of state-of-the-art NFT technology and furnishes summary standards and desired properties. Finally, the study concludes with an elaborate discussion of the future outlook for and prime challenges faced by NFTs.

Editorial:Blockchain‐based 6Gand industrial internet of things systems for industry 4.0/5.0

The industrial internet of things (IIoT) and Industry 4.0/5.0 enable the integration of machinery, equipment, processes, and humans across a variety of vertical sectors, including manufacturing and logistics supply chains, transportation, and medical care (Yadav et al., 2022). Several types of sensor nodes link these interconnected machines/appliances, sensing and transmitting data to the nodes or the cloud. To manage those links, next-generation networking technologies, such as 6G and Cybertwin, are being introduced. Sixth-generation (6G) communication will be critical in providing complex wireless interconnections, with 6G networks expected to be capable of supporting millions of linked devices and systems while maintaining high data rates and low latency (Kanwal et al., 2022). Blockchain is one emerging technology that can contribute to IIoT stability. Blockchain looks to offer a solution to maintain user privacy while still preserving the capacity for immutable information and replication. A blockchain technology is used to enforce a free distributed ledger to record transactions by peer-to-peer network nodes (P2Ps) and to avoid the need for a central authority through a distributed consensus process. This special issue focuses on six high-quality studies that address real-world issues in IIoT. Sharma et al. (2021) suggested a blockchain-based IoT architecture that uses the identity-based encryption (IBE) algorithm to improve the security of healthcare data. In this case, the smart contract outlines all of the fundamental processes of the healthcare system, which can benefit all stakeholders. Many tests are carried out in order to assess the efficacy of the suggested strategy. The findings reveal that the suggested system outperforms the current well-known strategies. Al-Haija et al. (2022) built a strong classifier for identifying and categorizing various cyberattacks in IoT networks using the AdaBoost machine learning algorithm paired with decision trees and substantial data engineering techniques. We test our system using the TON IoT 2020 datasets, which are a collection of datasets designed particularly for three-layered IoT systems that include physical, network, and application layers. We compare our system's performance to that of existing cutting-edge technologies. Our experimental results show that our framework is capable of offering improved classification accuracy and reduces kinds 1 and 2 mistakes for building more durable IoT infrastructures. Babu et al. (2022) introduced a unique IoT device authentication technique based on IBE and a blockchain network. Blockchain is utilized as a distributed PKG, removing the single point of failure and key escrow issue associated with PKGs. Furthermore, the suggested work is implemented on Hyperledger Fabric, an open-source blockchain platform that effectively handles the adding, updating, and deletion operations required for successful IoT device authentication and communication. Mehbodniya et al. (2022) created a framework for signature creation and verification using a modified Lamport Merkle Digital Signature technique. It employs a central healthcare controller (CHC) to determine the origin of the created signature as well as verification and authentication. To validate the signature, the validation hash public key with create key is necessary. When compared with conventional approaches, this resulted in more efficient, cost-effective, and speedier security. Vigneysh et al. (2022) provided a successful technique for increasing dynamic responsiveness during system uncertainties such as voltage distortions, frequency changes, renewable energy source variations, and the presence of non-linear and unbalanced loads. It also increases the quality of current fed into the grid during uncertainty. The suggested control approach is used to manage both the dc side capacitor voltage and the current loop of a grid-connected inverter. The suggested system is simulated in the MATLAB Simulink environment, and its performance is compared with that of standard controllers to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed control technique during system anomalies. Patil et al. (2022) developed a two-phased technique for blockchain and IoT federated networks that use a multi-criteria-based approach to connection selection. The dynamic gateway scheduling technique is capable of supporting both blockchain-based transactions and IoT device connectivity. Furthermore, the suggested technique improves the fairness of data transfer for each gateway, resulting in efficient data transmission. Before using the link selection process, machine learning (ML) approaches are used to examine the state of the communication channels. The links are then selected using multi-criteria statistical approaches. Finally, scheduling is carried out in order to identify the best gateway for quickly channelling blockchain data.

DIPLOMA VERICIFATION USING BY BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY

Blockchain technology is attracting attention from academies, industries, governments all over the world. Expectations of increased potential have led to extensive exploration of the use of this technology in various application platforms. Today, blockchain is considered to be a technological breakthrough that touches all areas of social life, and is expected to lead to very significant changes, especially in a few application areas. In the study; A certification diploma verification system has been developed using the decentralized, open-source blockchain platform. Thanks to the integration of blockchain technology with the document verification system, the centrality in the control mechanism can be eliminated and user initiative can be eliminated. In addition, the task of verifying documents in existing systems is a time-consuming process. Treatment can take up to several months, depending on the provider's response. Thanks to the blockchain, employers or institutions that want to verify documents will be able to perform their transactions without spending time and money.

Implementation of a Distributed Framework for Permissioned Blockchain-Based Secure Automotive Supply Chain Management.

An automotive supply chain includes a range of activities from the concept of the product to its final transfer to a customer and subsequent vehicle maintenance. The three distinct stages of this chain are production, sales, and maintenance. In many countries, automobile records are not available to the public and anyone who has access to the central database or government systems can tamper with these records. In addition, used vehicle maintenance and transfer histories remain unavailable or inaccessible. These issues can be overcome by incorporating state-of-the-art blockchain technology into automotive supply chain management. Blockchain technology uses a chain of blocks for distributed transfer and storage of information, creating a decentralized data register that makes records of any digital asset tamper-proof and transparent. In this paper, we implement a permissioned blockchain-based framework for secure and efficient supply chain management of the automobile industry. We employed Hyperledger Fabric; an enterprise-grade distributed ledger platform for developing solutions. In our solution, the blockchain is customized and private in order to ensure system security. We evaluated our system in terms of memory cost, monetary cost, and speed of execution. Our results demonstrate that only 346 MB of extra memory space is required for storing the automotive data of 1 million users, thus rendering the memory cost negligible. The monetary cost is insignificant as all open source blockchain resources are employed, and the speed of record update is also fast. Our results also show that the decentralization of the automotive supply chain using blockchain can implement system security with minor modifications in the established configuration of the web application database.

Adding Semantics to Measurements

The design and operation of modern software systems exhibit a shift towards virtualization, containerization and service-based orchestration. Performance capacity engineering and resource utilization tuning become priority requirements in such environments.
 Measurement-based performance evaluation is the cornerstone of capacity engineering and designing for performance. Moreover, the increasing complexity of systems necessitates rigorous performance analysis approaches. However, empirical performance analysis lacks sophisticated model-based support similar to the functional design of the system.
 The paper proposes an ontology-based approach for facilitating and guiding the empirical evaluation throughout its various steps. Hyperledger Fabric (HLF), an open-source blockchain platform by the Linux Foundation, is modelled and evaluated as a pilot example of the approach, using the standard TPC-C performance benchmark workload.

Institutional Logic, Dilemma and Suggestions of Open Source Innovation: A Case Study of Blockchain

Open-source software has made a breakthrough in the traditional intellectual property theory from the aspects of Copyright, patent right, and trademark right, and it has created a new property rights form in the form of license. Taking blockchain as an example, this paper analyzes bitcoin and Ethereum and their open-source licensing strategies. At the same time, it explores the problems encountered in the property rights of open-source blockchain and three possible solutions to this dilemma: The industry-standard licensing plan, blockchain open-source licensing scheme, and open patent scheme. This research will be significant for expanding and enriching the theoretical and practical analysis of blockchain open source in the field of intellectual property.

A Novel Vote Counting System Based on Secure Blockchain

It has long been difficult to create a safe electronic voting system that provides the transparency and flexibility provided by electronic systems, while maintaining the fairness and privacy of present voting methods. Voting, especially during elections, is a technique where participants do not trust one another since the system might be attacked not just by an outsider but also by participants themselves (voters and organizers). The traditional methods of voting systems find it challenging to maintain the characteristics of an ideal voting system since there is a chance of tampering with results and disturbing the process itself. As a result, the effectiveness of the voting system is increased by translating the characteristics of an ideal voting system into digital space. It greatly lowers the expense of the elections and the work of the inspectors. In this essay, we'll use the open-source Blockchain technology to suggest a new electronic voting system's architecture. New chances to create new kinds of digital services are being provided by Blockchain. Numerous elements of our life have been altered by Blockchain technology, including the ability to save digital transactions via the Internet, confirm their legitimacy, license them, and provide the greatest level of security and encryption. This system offers a distributed architecture for storing the data, which distributes the data among many servers. In addition to maintaining voter identity outside of the vote count, this technology makes the voting process transparent.

Do we need to pay technical debt in blockchain software systems?

For blockchain software systems, framework developers may introduce technical debts that application developers are not aware of. Because these technical debts can have a negative impact on software projects, we need to investigate the issue of technical debt in blockchain software systems. We wanted to investigate what types of self-introduced technical debt exist in open-source blockchain software systems, and how these technical debts are distributed. We have selected six most popular blockchain software projects from GitHub. Then the code comments from these software projects were extracted and manually labelled. Finally, the code comments were statistically analysed. We propose a new type of technical debt, resource debt, which is explicitly identified by the framework developers and requires special attention in subsequent production systems. Six types of technical debt are prevalent and there is not any algorithm debt. In addition, we find that the code comments containing technical debt are not entirely determined by task tags. SATD is prevalent in blockchain projects. There is more significant variability between different application software projects for different technical debts. The results of the study imply that for detecting SATD, deep semantic discovery models should be used, such as pre-trained models.

P-777 Traceability and accountability in a “Virus-Free” vitrification program during the Covid-19 pandemic. Description of the first application of Blockchain for an IVF laboratory procedure

Study questionTo date, no publications exist describing Blockchain in IVF (Hickman, 2020). Can Blockchain technology be used for traceability and accountability in IVF laboratory procedures?Summary answerBlockchain is an easy-to-implement technology for incorruptible traceability of a “Virus-Free” vitrification/warming procedure.What is known alreadyIn healthcare, Blockchain can become a tool to address challenges regarding sensitive data-sharing and traceability of medical and laboratory procedures. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many authors warned about the role of LN2 as a potential vector for virus contamination, and vitrification and warming were identified as critical procedures for risk of contamination for environments, surfaces, operators and cells. In this study we describe the first application of Blockchain in IVF for incorruptible traceability of a “Virus-Free” vitrification/warming procedure based on the combined use of UVC-Sterilized Liquid Nitrogen (LN2) and CE Medical Devices (CE-MD).Study design, size, durationReport on 2346 Ethereum Blockchain data transactions for IVF laboratory procedures mined from 01/10/2019 to 31/12/2021. The procedures were oocyte/embryo vitrification, warming or handling in LN2 after cryopreservation. For each vitrification, warming and handling a UVC-sterilized batch of LN2 was associated with the code assigned to the vitrification/warming procedure and with the lot number of the single-use sterile vitrification box (N-Sleeve). The clinical results obtained from warmed oocytes/embryos were observed as completion of this process.Participants/materials, setting, methodsA Blockchain trusted “Virus-Free” vitrification/warming programme was set up using a specifically designed CE-MD N-Bath-System (Nterilizer-Italy). Each procedure was traced by the CE-MD’s software and a dedicated web application. Finally, data were made incorruptible by Ethereum Blockchain transactions. Before oocyte/embryo warming, vitrification carrier washing with UVC-sterilized LN2 was performed in accordance with Parmegiani et al (2012) and recent international anti-Covid guidelines.Main results and the role of chanceOf the 2346 Blockchain transactions 1268 regarded vitrification and cryopreserved specimen handling procedures; 1078 transactions were frozen cell warmings (308 oocytes and 770 embryos) performed on 799 patients. To date, 445 pregnancies have been obtained (pregnancy rate: 41% per cycle; 56% per patient) and 219 babies have been born.Limitations, reasons for cautionEthereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether is the native cryptocurrency which is highly susceptible to cost changes. Other public or private Blockchains may be used in future in healthcare with more stable transaction costs.Wider implications of the findingsThis is the first evidence of the application of Blockchain in IVF and many others will probably follow. Blockchain immutable records of LN2 sterilization combined with procedure codes and disposable lots represent incorruptible traces for “Virus-Free” vitrification/warming. During this pandemic 219 babies were born from cryopreservation procedures powered by Blockchain.Trial registration numberNot Applicable

Towards a Secure and Scalable Maritime Monitoring System Using Blockchain and Low-Cost IoT Technology

Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) is a strategic field of study that seeks to provide a coastal country with an effective monitoring of its maritime resources and its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). In this scope, a Maritime Monitoring System (MMS) aims to leverage active surveillance of military and non-military activities at sea using sensing devices such as radars, optronics, automatic Identification Systems (AISs), and IoT, among others. However, deploying a nation-scale MMS imposes great challenges regarding the scalability and cybersecurity of this heterogeneous system. Aiming to address these challenges, this work explores the use of blockchain to leverage MMS cybersecurity and to ensure the integrity, authenticity, and availability of relevant navigation data. We propose a prototype built on a permissioned blockchain solution using HyperLedger Fabric—a robust, modular, and efficient open-source blockchain platform. We evaluate this solution’s performance through a practical experiment where the prototype receives sensing data from a Software-Defined-Radio (SDR)-based low-cost AIS receiver built with a Raspberry Pi. In order to reduce scalability attrition, we developed a dockerized blockchain client easily deployed on a large scale. Furthermore, we determined, through extensive experimentation, the client optimal hardware configuration, also aiming to reduce implementation and maintenance costs. The performance results provide a quantitative analysis of the blockchain technology overhead and its impact in terms of Quality of Service (QoS), demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of our solution in the scope of an MMS using AIS data.

Improving blockchain performance in clinical trials using intelligent optimal transaction traffic control mechanism in smart healthcare applications

Blockchain technology has revolutionized the ways of processing and storing data in terms of reliability and security. Blockchain plays a pivotal role in transferring the processing hurdle from the client–server to a decentralized and secured platform. Blockchain is deemed to be an efficient technology in a forthcoming era that would beneficiate multifarious industries. An issue that becomes a bottleneck for blockchain-based applications is their restricted ability to process in comparison to distributed database systems. In this paper, we present intelligent traffic control using a hybrid model based on the PSO-based optimization algorithm and fuzzy logic in order to improve blockchain performance. The real-time network feedback model is designed and used as an input to control the transaction traffic across the entire network in a robust way without human intervention. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the designed model, a clinical trial service framework as a test network is implemented on top of Hyperledger Fabric. The case study is further compared with baseline network, network with fuzzy approach, and network with optimized parameter. The experiments show that the proposed model not only enhanced the network by maximizing the network throughput and minimizing the network latency. A smart contract is implemented to automate the transaction flow as per real-time data of network conditions. An open-source blockchain framework, Hyperledger Fabric, is harnessed for implementation of the experiment environment in order to signify the potential of the proposed model. The outcome of this study indicated a remarkable increase in transaction throughput (i.e., 38.5%) and a decrease in transaction latency of 40.5%. Moreover, the proposed model can easily be integrated with other existing blockchain-based performance-enhancing tools.