This letter presents a federated learning-basd data-accumulation scheme that combines drones and blockchain for remote regions where Internet of Things devices face network scarcity and potential cyber threats. The scheme contains a two-phase authentication mechanism in which requests are first validated using a cuckoo filter, followed by a timestamp nonce. Secure accumulation is achieved by validating models using a Hampel filter and loss checks. To increase the privacy of the model, differential privacy is employed before sharing. Finally, the model is stored in the blockchain after consent is obtained from mining nodes. Experiments are performed in a proper environment, and the results confirm the feasibility of the proposed scheme.

FBI: A Federated Learning-Based Blockchain-Embedded Data Accumulation Scheme Using Drones for Internet of Things

The virtual world created by the development of the Internet, computers, artificial intelligence (AI), and hardware technologies have brought various degrees of digital transformation to people’s lives. With multiple demands for virtual reality increasing, the metaverse, a new type of social ecology that can connect the physical and virtual worlds, is booming. However, with the rapid growth of data volume and value, the continuous evolution of the metaverse faces the demands and challenges of privacy, security, high synchronization, and low latency. Fortunately, the ever-evolving blockchain and intelligent networking technologies can be used to satisfy the trusted construction, continuous data interaction, and computing demands of the metaverse. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct an in-depth review of the role and gains of blockchain, intelligent networking, and the combination of both in providing the immersive experiences of the metaverse. In this survey, we first discuss the development trend, characteristics, and architecture of the metaverse. Then, the existing work on blockchain, networking, and the combination of the two technologies are reviewed, including overviews, applications, and challenges. Next, applications of the metaverse are summarized, emphasizing the importance of the metaverse and the fields of development. Finally, we discuss some open issues, challenges, and future research directions. 

A Survey of Blockchain and Intelligent Networking for the Metaverse

Today, blockchain is becoming more popular in academia and industry because it is a distributed, decentralised technology which is changing many industries in terms of security, building trust, etc. A few blockchain applications are banking, insurance, logistics, transportation, etc. Many insurance companies have been thinking about how blockchain could help them be more efficient. There is still a lot of hype about this immutable technology, even though it has not been utilised to its full potential. Insurers have to decide whether or not to use blockchain, just like many other businesses do. This technology keeps a distributed ledger on each blockchain node, making it more secure and transparent. The blockchain network can operate smart contracts and convince others to agree, so criminals cannot make mistakes. On another side, the Internet of Things (IoT) might make a real-time application work faster through its automation. With the integration of blockchain and IoT, there will always be a problem with technology regarding IoT devices and mining the blockchain. This paper gives a real-time view of blockchain—IoT-based applications for Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0. The last few sections discuss essential topics such as open issues, challenges, and research opportunities for future researchers to expand research in blockchain—IoT-based applications.

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Blockchain—Internet of Things Applications: Opportunities and Challenges for Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0

Network slicing is one of the fundamental tenets of Fifth Generation (5G)/Sixth Generation (6G) networks. Deploying slices requires end-to-end (E2E) control of services and the underlying resources in a network substrate featuring an increasing number of stakeholders. Beyond the technical difficulties this entails, there is a long list of administrative negotiations among parties that do not necessarily trust each other, which often requires costly manual processes, including the legal construction of neutral entities. In this context, Blockchain comes to the rescue by bringing its decentralized yet immutable and auditable lemdger, which has a high potential in the telco arena. In this sense, it may help to automate some of the above costly processes. There have been some proposals in this direction that are applied to various problems among different stakeholders. This paper aims at structuring this field of knowledge by, first, providing introductions to network slicing and blockchain technologies. Then, state-of-the-art is presented through a global architecture that aggregates the various proposals into a coherent whole while showing the motivation behind applying Blockchain and smart contracts to network slicing. And finally, some limitations of current work, future challenges and research directions are also presented. 

Distributed Ledger Technologies for Network Slicing: A Survey

Thanks to the booming development of artificial intelligence, 5G technology, and intelligent manufacturing technology, numerous intelligent edge devices contained in the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) are endowed with the ability to mine knowledge from perceived massive data. Knowledge-driven IIoT plays an unprecedented role in application fields such as cyber-physical systems and Industry 4.0. However, knowledge is generally scattered across the distributed edge devices of IIoT. Therefore, in order to further achieve the edge intelligence in IIoT, it is very important to explore an efficient edge knowledge sharing method. In this article, we establish a decentralized knowledge sharing platform in IIoT. First, for public knowledge, a dynamics model that can quantitatively describe its sharing process is established by using the system dynamics theory. Furthermore, a control method for maximizing public knowledge sharing under constraints based on the optimal control theory is presented. Second, for private knowledge, a trusted transaction control method based on blockchain technology is proposed. By developing both smart contract and lightweight consensus mechanism, the efficient peer-to-peer sharing of private knowledge is realized, and the integrity of knowledge and the privacy of participants are protected. The results of extensive experiments show that the proposed method can eliminate the obstacles of knowledge sharing among edge devices in IIoT, and further promote the development of edge intelligence empowered 5G-enabled IIoT applications. 

An Efficient Approach to Sharing Edge Knowledge in 5G-Enabled Industrial Internet of Things

Trusted third parties (TTPs) are frequently used for serving as an authority to issue and verify transactions in applications. Although the TTP-based paradigm provides customers with convenience, it causes a whole set of inevitable problems such as security threats, privacy vulnerabilities, and censorship. The TTP-based paradigm is not suitable for all modern networks, e.g., 5G and beyond networks, which are been evolving to support ubiquitous, decentralized, and autonomous services. Driven by the vision of blockchain technologies, there has been a paradigm shift in applications, from TTP-based to decentralized-trust-based. Decentralized applications (DApps) with blockchains promise no trust on authorities, tackling the key challenges of security and privacy problems. A main thrust of blockchain research is to explore frameworks and paradigms for decentralizing applications, fostering a number of new designs ranging from network architectures to business models. Therefore, this paper provides a compact and concise survey on the state-of-the-art research of decentralizing applications with blockchain in the 5G and beyond perspective. We provide four burning 5G and beyond challenges and discuss five aspects of motivation for decentralizing applications with blockchain. Then, we define nine fundamental modules of blockchains and explain the potential influence of these modules on decentralization in depth. We also discuss the interrelation between decentralization and some desired blockchain properties. Particularly, we present the capabilities of blockchain for decentralizing applications through reviewing DApps for 5G and beyond. We clearly distinguish three blockchain paradigms and discuss how developers to make right choices for 5G and beyond. Finally, we highlight important learned lessons and open issues in applying blockchain for decentralizing applications. Lessons learned and open issues from this survey will facilitate the transformation of centralized applications to DApps.

A Survey of Decentralizing Applications via Blockchain: The 5G and Beyond Perspective

With the development of big data and blockchain, an increasing number of scholars have begun to study blockchain for data sharing. By studying data sharing models that are based on blockchain, we find that almost all of them have the following problems: 1) it is difficult to protect the privacy and integrity of users’ data, along with users’ data ownership; 2) the storage burden of blockchain is heavy, and blockchain lacks a mechanism for dealing with data with diverse types and inconsistent formats; and 3) the consensus mechanism has low fairness or low efficiency. Therefore, we propose a data-sharing privacy protection model (DS2PM) that is based on blockchain and a federated learning mechanism for solving these problems. The safety analysis and experimental results show that the DS2PM outperforms the previously established schemes.

DS2PM: A Data-Sharing Privacy Protection Model Based on Blockchain and Federated Learning

This study aimed to explore the effect and mechanism of Dragon's Blood on wound healing in patients with a pressure hand injury. A total of 120 patients with pressure hand injury treated in our hospital were randomly divided into two groups. Sixty patients in the control group were dressed with sterile gauze, and 60 patients in the observation group were smeared with blood exhaustion. The clinical effects and serological indexes of the two groups were compared, and the mechanism of wound healing was analyzed. The results showed that the treatment effective rate of the control group was 80% and that of the observation group was 93.33%. The treatment effective rate of the observation group was dramatically higher (P < 0.05). The number of patients with good granulation tissue in the observation group was 53, which was dramatically greater than that in the control group. The number of patients with a small amount of wound exudation was 51, which was dramatically greater than that in the control group (P < 0.05). After treatment, the levels of matrix metalloproteinase (MMP-3), vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), and transforming growth factor B1 (TGF-B1) in the observation group increased more dramatically (P < 0.05). The level of tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase-1 (TIMP-1) decreased to 617.23 ng/L in the observation group, and the degree of reduction was more obvious (P < 0.05). Notably, Dragon's Blood promoted wound healing at the injury site by increasing the levels of MMP-3, VEGF, and TGF-B1and decreasing TIMP-1. The area of wound reduction in the observation group was 0.27 cm2, and the reduction was more obvious (P < 0.05). The healing time of pressure hand injury in the observation group was 15.27 days, which was dramatically shorter (P < 0.05). In summary, Dragon's Blood had a good effect on the healing of the injured site in patients with pressure hand injury, which is worthy of promotion.

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Kaifeng Yue

Papers

A Survey of Decentralizing Applications via Blockchain: The 5G and Beyond Perspective

DS2PM: A Data-Sharing Privacy Protection Model Based on Blockchain and Federated Learning

Effect and Mechanism of Dragon's Blood on Wound Healing of Patients with Stress Hand Injury