Networking Impact and Support for Blockchains
Doctoral thesis
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https://hdl.handle.net/11250/3051999Utgivelsesdato
2023Metadata
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Sammendrag
With the rapid development of information and communication technologies, infrastructures, resources, and networking applications, systems have become complex and heterogeneous. This also creates a massive amount of data exchange, and end devices may produce security, privacy, and performance issues. The research community has proposed blockchain as a disruptive technology to bring about decentralized, secure, transparent, and efficient network operation and management. One of the critical challenges is investigating the capability of the technology so that it can be used in such a complex domain. This thesis aims to examine the impact and support of networking in blockchain while providing insight into the workflow of the technology, investigate its capability in terms of the transaction confirmation time, and explore the applicability of the technology in such domains and possible setbacks that may arise. The research contributions of this Ph.D. work are divided into three parts.
First, we prepared a testbed to study blockchain capabilities. Based on the collected dataset, a comprehensive study of the transaction characteristics of Bitcoin, the first blockchain-based application, was performed. A set of results and finding of the fundamental process were obtained, such as inter-block generation and inter-transaction arrival following an exponential distribution. The transaction fee and size distribution di↵er from the documentation. Moreover, the block size distribution varies over time, mainly because transaction generation varies over time. Compared to the state of the art, to the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to confirm several hypotheses and assumptions in the literature.
Furthermore, Bitcoin can process 3.3 to 7.2 transactions per second, which has increased the number of arrivals waiting for pick up. This has resulted in an increase in transaction fees and affected the transaction confirmation time. This led to a study on understanding and predicting how Bitcoin handles transactions. Thus, a user will know when to request a transaction and miners will know to choose the appropriate mining pool to earn a fair reward. The analysis consists of two parts. The first part is an exploratory data analysis revealing critical characteristics of various fundamental processes for handling Bitcoin transactions. The second part is a predictability analysis intended to provide answers to or insights into several fundamental aspects of transactions handling.
Second, based on the fundamental transaction characteristics, we examined the impact of peer formation strategies and how miners’ financial interests affect the transaction waiting time. We also investigated the impact of the number of peers (peer lists) per node or miner and the end-to-end delay to understand node-to-node communication. A testbed-based study showed that peer selection strategies affect transaction propagation and confirmation time. The study also showed that smaller transactions exhibit longer confirmation times, even with the increasing block size. Moreover, the miner transaction selection strategy impacts the final gain.
Third, blockchain as a network function has been proposed to support the underlying network infrastructure to provide services that satisfy stringent QoS requirements. However, few works in the literature have investigated the suitability of blockchain in networking and the possible setbacks that may arise. To fill this research gap, we conducted a state-of-the-art study on whether blockchain can be adopted in networking and then to what extent possible use cases can be provided. For instance, as a service, blockchain allows tenants and subscribers to manage slice information as necessary without violating the agreement.
In summary, in this thesis, we examine the impact and support of networking for the evolving technology, blockchain, while highlighting to what extent it can be used in complex and heterogeneous systems.
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Paper 1: Gebraselase, Befekadu Gezaheng; Helvik, Bjarne Emil; Jiang, Yuming. Transaction Characteristics of Bitcoin. I: 2021 IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM). IEEE 2021 ISBN 978-3-903176-32-4. s. 544-550 © 2021IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Paper 2: Gebraselase, Befekadu Gezaheng; Helvik, Bjarne Emil; Jiang, Yuming. An Analysis of Transaction Handling in Bitcoin. I: 2021 IEEE International Conference on Smart Data Services (SMDS 2021). IEEE 2021 ISBN 978-1-6654-0058-9. s. 162-172. © 2021IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Paper 3: Gebraselase, Befekadu Gezaheng; Helvik, Bjarne Emil; Jiang, Yuming. Effect of Miner Incentive on the Confirmation Time of Bitcoin Transactions. I: Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain). IEEE conference proceedings 2021 ISBN 978-1-6654-1760-0. s. 521-529 © 2021IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Paper 4: Gebraselase, Befekadu; Helvik, Bjarne Emil; Jiang, Yuming. Bitcoin P2P Network Measurements: A testbed study of the effect of peer selection on transaction propagation and confirmation times. IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management 2022 ;Volum 19.(4) s. 3975-3987 © 2022IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Paper 5: Gebraselase, Befekadu Gezaheng; Helvik, Bjarne Emil; Jiang, Yuming. Suitability of Blockchains to Enable and Support Networking Functions: State of Art. I: CCIOT 2019: Proceedings of the 2019 4th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Internet of Things. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2019 ISBN 978-1-4503-7241-1. s. 110-119 "© ACM, 2019. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the 2019 4th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Internet of Things https://doi.org/10.1145/3361821.3361838
Paper 6: Gebraselase, Befekadu Gezaheng. Blockchain-Based Information Management for Network Slicing,” 2021 International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Knowledge Economy (ICCIKE), 2021, pp. 555-559. © 2021IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Paper 7: Gebraselase, Befekadu; Adrah, Charles Mawutor; Zerihun, Tesfaye Amare; Helvik, Bjarne Emil; Heegaard, Poul Einar. Blockchain Support For Time-Critical Self-Healing In Smart Distribution Grids. I: 2022 IEEE PES Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Europe - ISGT-Europe. IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) 2022 ISBN 978-1-6654-8032-1. s. - © 2022IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.