An increasing number of industries rely on Internet-of-Things devices to track physical resources. Blockchain technology provides primitives to represent these resources as digital assets on a secure distributed ledger. Due to the proliferation of blockchain-based assets, there is an increasing need for a generic mechanism to trade assets between isolated platforms. To date, there is no such mechanism without reliance on a trusted third party.
In this work, we address this shortcoming and present XChange. Unlike existing approaches for decentralized asset trading, we decouple trade management and the actual exchange of assets. XChange mediates trade of any digital asset between isolated blockchain platforms while limiting the fraud conducted by adversarial parties. We first describe a generic, five-phase trading protocol that establishes and executes trade between individuals. This protocol accounts full trade specifications on a separate blockchain. We then devise a lightweight system architecture, composed of all required components for a generic asset marketplace.
We implement XChange and conduct real-world experimentation. We leverage an existing, lightweight blockchain, TrustChain, to account all orders and full trade specifications. By deploying XChange on multiple low-resource devices, we show that a full trade completes within half a second. To quantify the scalability of our mechanism, we conduct further experiments on our compute cluster. We conclude that the throughput of XChange, in terms of trades per second, scales linearly with the system load. Furthermore, we find that XChange exhibits superior throughput and order fulfil latency compared to related decentralized exchanges, BitShares and Waves.
Computational task offloading based on edge computing can deal with the performance bottleneck of traditional cloud-based systems for Internet of things (IoT). To further optimize computing efficiency and resource allocation, collaborative offloading has been put forward to enable the offloading from edge devices to IoT terminal devices. However, there still lack incentive mechanisms to encourage participants to take over tasks from others. To counter this situation, this paper proposes a distributed computational resource trading strategy addressing multiple preferences of IoT users. Unlike m…
Scalability and security problems of the centralized architecture models in cyberphysical systems have great potential to be solved by novel blockchain based distributed models.A decentralized energy trading system takes advantage of various sources and effectively coordinates the energy to ensure optimal utilization of the available resources. It achieves that goal by managing physical, social and business infrastructures using technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and network systems. Addressing the importance of blockchain-enabled energy trading in the context of cy…
In the last few years, electric utility companies have increasingly invested into transactive energy systems. This trend was primarily caused by the integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) and internet-of-things (IoT) devices into their existing distribution networks. Influenced by the general interest in blockchain technologies, many industry specialists are considering new, more efficient peer-to-peer market structures for DERs. Since blockchain-based energy exchanges can automate transactions between their members and provide increased levels of security thanks to smart contracts…
Climate change and global warming are the significant challenges of the new century. A viable solution to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions is via a globally incentivized market mechanism proposed in the Kyoto protocol. In this view, the carbon dioxide (or other greenhouse gases) emission is considered a commodity, forming a carbon trading system. There have been attempts in developing this idea in the past decade with limited success. The main challenges of current systems are fragmented implementations, lack of transparency leading to over-crediting and double-spending, and substantial trans…
Mobile devices with embedded sensors for data collection and environmental sensing create a basis for a cost-effective approach for data trading. For example, these data can be related to pollution and gas emissions, which can be used to check the compliance with national and international regulations. The current approach for IoT data trading relies on a centralized third-party entity to negotiate between data consumers and data providers, which is inefficient and insecure on a large scale. In comparison, a decentralized approach based on distributed ledger technologies (DLT) enables data tra…
As Machine Learning (ML) models are becoming increasingly complex, one of the central challenges is their deployment at scale, such that companies and organizations can create value through Artificial Intelligence (AI). An emerging paradigm in ML is a federated approach where the learning model is delivered to a group of heterogeneous agents partially, allowing agents to train the model locally with their own data. However, the problem of valuation of models, as well the questions of incentives for collaborative training and trading of data/models, have received limited treatment in the litera…
In this paper, we address the digitization of physical assets using blockchain technology focusing on energy and peer-to-peer trading on decentralized energy markets. Because they are forward markets and operate on a day-ahead timeline, the energy transactions are settled only at the movement of energy delivery. Having the option of locking the energy tokens by a third-party escrow becomes a highly desirable feature. Thus, we define a Lockable ERC20 token that provides the option for an owner to lock some of its tokens using smart contracts. A time-lock and an escrow party account or smart con…
Blockchain has been regarded as a promising technology for Internet of Things (IoT), since it provides significant solutions for decentralized network which can address trust and security concerns, high maintenance cost problem, etc. The decentralization provided by blockchain can be largely attributed to the use of consensus mechanism, which enables peer-to-peer trading in a distributed manner without the involvement of any third party. This article starts from introducing the basic concept of blockchain and illustrating why consensus mechanism plays an indispensable role in a blockchain enab…
Robotics Institute, Innopolis University（Innopolis大学机器人研究所）
The decentralized trading market approach, where both autonomous agents and people can consume and produce services expanding own opportunities to reach goals, looks very promising as a part of the Fourth Industrial revolution. The key component of the approach is a blockchain platform that allows an interaction between agents via liability smart contracts. Reliability of a service provider is usually determined by a reputation model. However, this solution only warns future customers about an extent of trust to the service provider in case it could not execute any previous liabilities correct…
Flexible resources in built environments are seen as a low-cost opportunity for delivering grid management services. Consequently, the centralised aggregator model, where the aggregator is used to bundle demand flexibility from flexible resources and deliver it to flexibility customers such as Distributed/Transmission System Operator (DSO/TSO) in flexibility markets, has been adopted. However, the aggregator role introduces various security and trust challenges. In this work, we propose a blockchain-based flexibility trading framework dubbed PlexiChain to address the security and trust challen…
This work presents the design and implementation of a blockchain system that enables the trustable transactive energy management for distributed energy resources (DERs). We model the interactions among DERs, including energy trading and flexible appliance scheduling, as a cost minimization problem. Considering the dispersed nature and diverse ownership of DERs, we develop a distributed algorithm to solve the optimization problem using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) method. Furthermore, we develop a blockchain system, on which we implement the proposed algorithm with the…
SPEEDEX is a decentralized exchange (DEX) that lets participants securely trade assets without giving any single party undue control over the market. SPEEDEX offers several advantages over prior DEXes. It achieves high throughput -- over 200,000 transactions per second on 48-core servers, even with tens of millions of open offers. SPEEDEX runs entirely within a Layer-1 blockchain, and thus achieves its scalability without fragmenting market liquidity between multiple blockchains or rollups. It eliminates internal arbitrage opportunities, so that a direct trade from asset $\mathcal{A}$ to asset…
Internet of Things (IoT) data are increasingly viewed as a new form of massively distributed and large scale digital assets, which are continuously generated by millions of connected devices. The real value of such assets can only be realized by allowing IoT data trading to occur on a marketplace that rewards every single producer and consumer, at a very granular level. Crucially, we believe that such a marketplace should not be owned by anybody, and should instead fairly and transparently self-enforce a well defined set of governance rules. In this paper we address some of the technical chall…
The fast growth of distributed energy resources (DERs), such as distributed renewables (e.g., rooftop PV panels), energy storage systems, electric vehicles, and controllable appliances, drives the power system toward a decentralized system with bidirectional power flow. The coordination of DERs through an aggregator, such as a utility, system operator, or a third-party coordinator, emerges as a promising paradigm. However, it is not well understood how to enable trust between the aggregator and DERs to integrate DERs efficiently. In this paper, we develop a trustable and distributed coordinati…
In the traditional mobile edge computing (MEC) system, the availability of MEC services is greatly limited for the edge users of the cell due to serious signal attenuation and inter-cell interference. User-centric MEC (UC-MEC) can be seen as a promising solution to address this issue. In UC-MEC, each user is served by a dedicated access point (AP) cluster enabled with MEC capability instead of a single MEC server, however, at the expense of more energy consumption and greater privacy risks. To achieve efficient and reliable resource utilization with user-centric services, we propose an energy …
The advent of distributed energy resources (DERs), such as distributed renewables, energy storage, electric vehicles, and controllable loads, \rv{brings} a significantly disruptive and transformational impact on the centralized power system. It is widely accepted that a paradigm shift to a decentralized power system with bidirectional power flow is necessary to the integration of DERs. The virtual power plant (VPP) emerges as a promising paradigm for managing DERs to participate in the power system. In this paper, we develop a blockchain-based VPP energy management platform to facilitate a ric…
