Blizzard: a Distributed Consensus Protocol for Mobile Devices

Towards Mobile Distributed Ledgers

Advances in mobile computing have paved the way for new types of distributed applications that can be executed solely by mobile devices on device-to-device (D2D) ecosystems (e.g., crowdsensing). Sophisticated applications, like cryptocurrencies, need distributed ledgers to function. Distributed ledgers, such as blockchains and directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), employ consensus protocols to add data in the form of blocks. However, such protocols are designed for resourceful devices that are interconnected via the Internet. Moreover, existing distributed ledgers are not deployable to D2D ecosystem…

Blockene: A High-throughput Blockchain Over Mobile Devices

We introduce Blockene, a blockchain that reduces resource usage at member nodes by orders of magnitude, requiring only a smartphone to participate in block validation and consensus. Despite being lightweight, Blockene provides a high throughput of transactions and scales to a large number of participants. Blockene consumes negligible battery and data in smartphones, enabling millions of users to participate in the blockchain without incentives, to secure transactions with their collective honesty. Blockene achieves these properties with a novel split-trust design based on delegating storage an…

Distributed Localization and Tracking of Mobile Networks Including Noncooperative Objects - Extended Version

We propose a Bayesian method for distributed sequential localization of mobile networks composed of both cooperative agents and noncooperative objects. Our method provides a consistent combination of cooperative self-localization (CS) and distributed tracking (DT). Multiple mobile agents and objects are localized and tracked using measurements between agents and objects and between agents. For a distributed operation and low complexity, we combine particle-based belief propagation with a consensus or gossip scheme. High localization accuracy is achieved through a probabilistic information tran…

Expressive Power of Broadcast Consensus Protocols

Population protocols are a formal model of computation by identical, anonymous mobile agents interacting in pairs. Their computational power is rather limited: Angluin et al. have shown that they can only compute the predicates over $\mathbb{N}^k$ expressible in Presburger arithmetic. For this reason, several extensions of the model have been proposed, including the addition of devices called cover-time services, absence detectors, and clocks. All these extensions increase the expressive power to the class of predicates over $\mathbb{N}^k$ lying in the complexity class NL when the input is giv…

Automatic Analysis of Expected Termination Time for Population Protocols

Population protocols are a formal model of sensor networks consisting of identical mobile devices. Two devices can interact and thereby change their states. Computations are infinite sequences of interactions in which the interacting devices are chosen uniformly at random. In well designed population protocols, for every initial configuration of devices, and for every computation starting at this configuration, all devices eventually agree on a consensus value. We address the problem of automatically computing a parametric bound on the expected time the protocol needs to reach this consensus. …

Coded Stochastic ADMM for Decentralized Consensus Optimization with Edge Computing

Big data, including applications with high security requirements, are often collected and stored on multiple heterogeneous devices, such as mobile devices, drones and vehicles. Due to the limitations of communication costs and security requirements, it is of paramount importance to extract information in a decentralized manner instead of aggregating data to a fusion center. To train large-scale machine learning models, edge/fog computing is often leveraged as an alternative to centralized learning. We consider the problem of learning model parameters in a multi-agent system with data locally p…

分布式随机逼近算法与重尾信息年龄

Distributed Stochastic Approximation Algorithms and Heavy-Tailed Age of Information

本文首次在重尾且可能无限均值的信息年龄下分析分布式随机逼近算法，证明严格耗散多智能体系统的稳定性与收敛性，弥合理论与实践差距。

QuickSilver: A Modeling and Parameterized Verification Framework for Systems with Distributed Agreement (Extended Version)

The last decade has sparked several valiant efforts in deductive verification of distributed agreement protocols such as consensus and leader election. Oddly, there have been far fewer verification efforts that go beyond the core protocols and target applications that are built on top of agreement protocols. This is unfortunate, as agreement-based distributed services such as data stores, locks, and ledgers are ubiquitous and potentially permit modular, scalable verification approaches that mimic their modular design. We address this need for verification of distributed agreement-based systems…