Overview

As blockchain technology mature, private blockchain network deployment has become increasingly feasible and desirable, especially for enterprise and Internet of Things use cases. Deploying private blockchain networks allows organizations to assert finer control over how these networks perform and behave. Such a degree of control, however, presents architects with a barrage of new design decisions that determine important network qualities such as performance, security, and governance. Moreover, network qualities play a dominating role in how the software deployed on a blockchain network (i.e., smart contracts) performs and behaves. Thus, it is beneficial to be able to quickly deploy and benchmark prototype networks to gather empirical evidence about the quality of network design for further refinement. In this paper, we propose an automation framework called NVAL that takes a representation of a blockchain network as an input, assesses it for consistency and feasibility, plans, and executes a sequence of actions that deploy the prescribed blockchain network on a designated hardware infrastructure and, optionally, evaluate it. In order to carry out this task, NVAL employs a novel graph-based blockchain model to describe the architecture of blockchain networks, a two-phase search mechanism for planning, and a system architecture that facilitates the extensibility of the capabilities making up the framework. We have developed and employed a proof-of-concept of NVAL to test a network design hypothesis and share the findings and experiences as parts of a demonstrative case study.

Project Members

• Nguyen Khoi Tran
• Liuyue (William) Jiang

Overview

Blockchain technologies have been increasingly adopted by enterprises to increase operational efficiency and enable new business models. These enterprise blockchain applications generally run on dedicated blockchain networks due to regulations and security requirements. The design process of these networks involves many decisions and trade-offs that impact security, governance, and performance of applications that run on them. The challenge is further exacerbated by the lack of a common architecture and concept map to communicate about blockchain networks, as blockchain technologies tend to use different concepts and architecture. This paper presents a concept map, an anatomy and the principal dimensions of the design space of blockchain networks. We applied the proposed design space in a case study about designing and deploying a blockchain network for an ad-hoc IoT infrastructure. We found that the design space brought structure to the design process and the analysis of design alternatives. The presented concept map, anatomy and design space are intended to help improve the blockchain network design practice and lay a foundation for future research on the design process and deployment automation of blockchain networks.

Publication

Anatomy, Concept, and Design Space of Blockchain Networks

Project Members

• Nguyen Khoi Tran
• M. Ali Babar

Overview

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) systems that incorporate blockchain (BC) elements in their architecture. Due to discrepancies between the requirements of IoT systems and the characteristics of BC networks, the motivations and design of these blockchain-enabled IoT systems (BC-IoT) are not only intriguing from a research perspective but also invaluable in practice. This paper presents an inductive study of the “why” and “how” of BC-IoT systems through a Systematic Literature Review of 120 peer-reviewed studies. To capture the diverse nature of BC-IoT integration, we proposed and applied a multi-perspective framework to analyse the existing systems. Regarding their motivations, we studied the improvement objectives and technical problems that drive the integration of BC. Regarding the design, we captured the position of BC within IoT systems as well as the content and processes that IoT systems offload to BC. As these dimensions are not mutually exclusive, they constitute a rich and multi-angle view of BC-IoT integration. Based on these findings, we defined 10 archetypes of BC-IoT systems that embody the core patterns of usage and configuration of BC in IoT systems.

Publication

Integrating Blockchain and Internet of Things Systems: A Systematic Review on Objectives and Designs

Project Team

• Nguyen Khoi Tran
• Jonathan Boan
• M. Ali Babar

Team Members

• Nguyen Khoi Tran
• Andrew Walters
• M. Ali Babar

Team Members

• Mitchell Dale
• Nguyen Khoi Tran

Team Members

• Nguyen Khoi Tran
• Bushra Sabir (ML Advisor)
• Mitchell Dale (Student)
• Nini Cui (Student)

Overview

Research and development activities in the Internet of Things domain are intrinsically linked to the physical world. They rely on the sensory data from the real world as inputs, and their results rely on experimentations in the physical world for evaluation. Therefore, gaining access to IoT testbeds that provide sensors, actuators, networks, and edge-based computation capabilities is critical in conducting IoT research and development.

Researchers generally either rely on large-scaled shared IoT testbeds or develop their micro-scaled test kits for their data collection and evaluation experiments. While large-scaled testbeds are at an advantage in terms of number, heterogeneity, and social-penetration of devices, these centrally planned and funded infrastructures are few comparing to the demand of researchers. On the other hand, even though micro-scaled test kits are accessible to researchers, they are limited in terms of the scope of their observation. Moreover, due to the variations in the development of the test kits, the specifications of the sensors, and the treatment of the data, the provenance, and trust of experiment data coming from micro-scaled test kits are hard to ascertain.

This project aims at an alternative design of IoT testbeds, denoted as Decentralized IoT Testbed (DTB). In this proposed design, the IoT testbed is not a centrally planned and funded infrastructure, but a conglomerate of test kits which are contributed and operated by research institutes, individual researchers, and other benefactors. In order to enable the decentralized governance and operation, DTB was architected DTB as a decentralised autonomous organization, running on a distributed ledger network.

Team Members

• Nguyen Khoi Tran
• Joseph Nguyen (Student)