Now showing 1 - 10 of 10
  • Publication
    Multi-Access Edge Computing and Blockchain-based Secure Telehealth System Connected with 5G and IoT
    There is a global hype in the development of digital healthcare infrastructure to cater the massive elderly population and infectious diseases. The digital facilitation is expected to ensure the patient privacy, scalability, and data integrity on the sensitive life critical healthcare data, while aligning to the global healthcare data protection standards. The patient data sharing to third parties such as research institutions and universities is also concerned as a significant contribution to the society to sharpen the research and investigations. The emergence of 5G communication technologies eradicates the borders between patients, hospital and other institutions with high end service standards. In patients' perspective, healthcare service delivery through the digital medium is beneficial in terms of time, costs, and risks. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-access Edge Computing(MEC) and blockchain based service architecture utilizing the lightweight ECQV (Elliptic Curve Qu-Vanstone) certificates for the realtime data privacy, integrity, and authentication between IoT, MEC, and cloud. We further attached storage offloading capability to the blockchain to ensure scalability with a massive number of connected medical devices to the cloud. We introduced a rewarding scheme to the patients and hospitals through the blockchain to encourage data sharing. The access control is handled through the smart contracts. We evaluated the proposed system in a near realistic implementation using Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform with Raspberry Pi devices to simulate the activity of the medical sensors.
    Scopus© Citations 26  583
  • Publication
    Survey on blockchain based smart contracts: Applications, opportunities and challenges
    Blockchain is one of the disruptive technical innovation in the recent computing paradigm. Many applications already notoriously hard and complex are fortunate to ameliorate the service with the blessings of blockchain and smart contracts. The decentralized and autonomous execution with in-built transparency of blockchain based smart contracts revolutionize most of the applications with optimum and effective functionality. The paper explores the significant applications which already benefited from the smart contracts. We also highlight the future potential of the blockchain based smart contracts in these applications perspective.
    Scopus© Citations 229  3447
  • Publication
    Survey on Blockchain based Smart Contracts: Technical Aspects and Future Research
    Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technology that makes people’s lives smart by conquering a plethora of diverse application and service areas. In near future, the fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks provide the connectivity for this IoT ecosystem. It has been carefully designed to facilitate the exponential growth in the IoT field. Network slicing is one of the key technologies in the 5G architecture that has the ability to divide the physical network into multiple logical networks (i.e. slices) with different network characteristics. Therefore, network slicing is also a key enabler of realisation of IoT in 5G. Network slicing can satisfy the various networking demands by heterogeneous IoT applications via dedicated slices. In this survey, we present a comprehensive analysis of the exploitation of network slicing in IoT realisation. We discuss network slicing utilisation in different IoT application scenarios, along with the technical challenges that can be solved via network slicing. Furthermore, integration challenges and open research problems related to the network slicing in the IoT realisation are also discussed in this paper. Finally, we discuss the role of other emerging technologies and concepts, such as blockchain and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning(AI/ML) in network slicing and IoT integration
    Scopus© Citations 58  560
  • Publication
    Blockchain-based Network Slice Broker to Facilitate Factory-as-a-Service
    The novel concept of Factory-as-a-Service~(FaaS) allows the agility of adapting the manufacturing process by identifying the industry's supply chain and user requirements. To cater to FaaS, flexibility in networking and cloud services is a must. 5G network slice broker is a third-party mediator that caters to networking resource demand from clients to the service providers. Thus, this paper introduces a secure blockchain-based network slice broker to facilitate FaaS. The proposed secure network slice broker (SNSB) provides secure, cognitive, and distributed network services for resource allocation and security service level agreement (SSLA) formation with coordination of slice managers and SSLA managers. In SNSB we introduce a federated slice selection algorithm with Stackelberg game model and Reinforcement Learning~(RL) algorithm to compute the real-time and the optimal unit price and demand level. Moreover, we provide an extensive implementation and performance evaluation of SNSB using the Katana slice manager and a custom SSLA manager.
      90Scopus© Citations 4
  • Publication
    The Role of Blockchain to Fight Against COVID-19
    IEEE The COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected almost all aspects of human life, various sectors of business, and regions of the world. The flow of human activities halted for several months, and are now being carefully redefined to align with guidelines and recommendations to avoid the spread of the novel coronavirus. In contrast to other pandemics the world has witnessed in the past, the technological advancements of the current era are a boon that can play a key role in safeguarding humanity. In this work, we begin by highlighting general challenges that have arisen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Next, to gauge the applicability of blockchain as a key enabling technology, we identify potential use cases to meet current needs. Further, for each use case, we present a high-level view of how blockchain can be leveraged and discuss the expected performance. Finally, we highlight the challenges that must be addressed to harness the full potential of blockchain technology and discuss plausible solutions.
      1234Scopus© Citations 141
  • Publication
    Blockchain-based Roaming and Offload Service Platform for Local 5G Operators
    Local 5G Operator (L5GO) concept is one of the most prominent versatile applications of the 5G in the near future. The popularity of L5GOs will trigger a greater number of roaming and offloading events between mobile operators. However, existing static and the operator-assisted roaming and offloading procedures are inefficient for L5GO ecosystem due to poor service quality, data privacy issues, data transferring delays, excessive costs for intermediary parties and existence of roaming fraud. To address these challenges, we propose a blockchain / Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) based service platform for L5GOs to facilitate efficient roaming and offload services. As the key contribution, blockchain-based smart contract scheme is proposed to establish dynamic and automated agreements between operators. By using smart contracts, we introduce several novel features such as universal wallet for subscribers, service quality based L5GO rating system, user-initiated roaming process and the roaming fraud prevention system to improve the operational quality of a L5GO. A prototype of the proposed platform is emulated with the Ethereum blockchain platform and Rinkeby Testnet to evaluate the performance and justify the feasibility of the proposal. Upon an extensive evaluation on the prototype, it was observed that the proposed platform offered benefits such as cost effective, more secure and reliable experience.
      390Scopus© Citations 7
  • Publication
    How DoS attacks can be mounted on Network Slice Broker and can they be mitigated using blockchain?
    Several recent works talk about the potential use of network slice brokering mechanism to facilitate the resource allocation of network slicing in next generation networks. This involves network tenants on the one hand and resource/infrastructure providers on the other hand. However, the potential downside of deploying Network Slice Broker (NSB) is that it can be victimized by DoS (Denial of Service) attack. Thus, the aim of this work is three fold. First, to present the possible ways in which DoS/DDoS attacks can be mounted on NSB and their adverse effects. Second, to propose and implement initial blockchain-based solution named as Security Service Blockchain (SSB) to prevent DoS attacks on NSB. Third, to enumerate the challenges and future research directions to effectively utilize blockchain for mitigating DoS/DDoS attacks on NSB. To evaluate the performance the proposed SSB framework is implemented using Hyperledger Fabric. The results manifest that the latency impact of the legitimate slice creation over scaled up malicious traffic remains minimal with the use of SSB framework. The integration of SSB with NSB results in gaining several fold reduction in latency under DoS attack scenario.
      9Scopus© Citations 7
  • Publication
    A Novel Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) Platform for Local 5G Operators
    5G is a promising technology that has the potential to support verticals and applications such as Industrial Internet of Things IoT (IIoT), smart cities, autonomous vehicles, remote surgeries, virtual and augmented realities, and so on. These verticals have a diverse set of network connectivity requirements, and it is challenging to deliver customized services for each by using a common 5G infrastructure. Thus, the operation of Local 5G operator (L5GO) networks or private 5G networks are a viable option to tackle this challenge. A L5GO network is a localized small cell network which can offer tailored service delivery. The adaptation of network softwarization in 5G allows vertical owners to deploy and operate L5GO networks. However, the deployment of L5GOs raises various issues related to management of subscribers, roaming users, spectrum, security, and also the infrastructure. This paper proposes a blockchain-based platform to address these issues. The paper introduces a set of blockchain-based modularized functions such as service rating systems, bidding techniques, and selection functions, which can be used to deploy different services for L5GOs. Exploitation of blockchain technology ensures availability, non-reliance on trusted third parties, secure transfer payments, and stands to gain many more advantages. The performance and the viability of the proposed platform are analyzed by using simulations and a prototype implementation.
    Scopus© Citations 28  233
  • Publication
    Fog Computing and Blockchain based Security Service Architecture for 5G Industrial IoT enabled Cloud Manufacturing
    Recent evolution of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) empowers the classical manufacturing model with cloud computing integration for Industry 4.0. Cloud integration advances the capabilities of manufacturing systems with cloud-based controlling and real-time process monitoring which is renowned as Cloud Manufacturing(CM). However, cloud integration exposes the entire manufacturing ecosystem to a new set of security risks and increment in end-to-end latency. Moving security services towards the edge eradicates message routing latency towards the cloud and eliminates the central point of failure while leveraging the entire system performance. We propose a blockchain and fog computing enabled security service architecture that operates on fog nodes at the edge of manufacturing equipment clusters. The proposed service facilitates CM equipment authentication and Equipment-Cloud channel privacy protection while preserving anonymity and unlinkability over the blockchain. We implemented the proposed architecture with Hyperledger Fabric and compared the performance advantage over the state of art solutions.
      28Scopus© Citations 34
  • Publication
    Blockchain-based Automated Certificate Revocation for 5G IoT
    Internet of Things (IoT) is a key topic of interest in modern communication context with the evolution of 5G and beyond ecosystems. 5G will interconnects billions of IoT devices wirelessly. The wireless communication exposes the devices to massive security risks in different dimensions. The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is one of the promising solutions to eliminate security risks. It ensures the authentication and communication integrity by using public key certificates. However, the overhead of certificate storage is a significant problem for the resource constrained IoT devices. We propose an application of Elliptic Curve Qu Vanstone (ECQV) certificates, which are lightweight in size for the resource restricted IoT devices. Furthermore, we incorporate the blockchain based smart contracts to handle the certificate related operations. We utilize the smart contracts in the certificate issuance and developed a smart contract based threat scoring mechanism to automatically revoke the certificates. The lightweight nature of ECQV certificates enables the distributed ledger to store, update, and revoke the certificates. We evaluated the proposed solution in Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform.
    Scopus© Citations 25  392