Due to the proliferation of ICT during the last few decades, there is an exponential increase in the usage of various smart applications such as smart farming, smart healthcare, supply-chain & logistics, business, tourism and hospitality, energy management etc. However, for all the aforementioned applications, security and privacy are major concerns keeping in view of the usage of the open channel, i.e., Internet for data transfer. Although many security solutions and standards have been proposed over the years to enhance the security levels of aforementioned smart applications, but the existing solutions are either based upon the centralized architecture (having single point of failure) or having high computation and communication costs. Moreover, most of the existing security solutions have focussed only on few aspects and fail to address scalability, robustness, data storage, network latency, auditability, immutability, and traceability. To handle the aforementioned issues, blockchain technology can be one of the solutions. Motivated from these facts, in this paper, we present a systematic review of various blockchain-based solutions and their applicability in various Industry 4.0-based applications. Our contributions in this paper are in four fold. Firstly, we explored the current state-of-the-art solutions in the blockchain technology for the smart applications. Then, we illustrated the reference architecture used for the blockchain applicability in various Industry 4.0 applications. Then, merits and demerits of the traditional security solutions are also discussed in comparison to their countermeasures. Finally, we provided a comparison of existing blockchain-based security solutions using various parameters to provide deep insights to the readers about its applicability in various applications.

Blockchain for Industry 4.0: A Comprehensive Review

Any online transaction that involves digital money is a bit of a challenge these days with the rising threats of hackers trying to steal bank details posted online. This leads to the invention of various kinds of crypto-currency, Bitcoin being one of them. The technology behind using the Bitcoin is popularly called as Blockchain. Blockchain is a digitized, de-centralized, public ledger of all crypto-currency transaction/s. Blockchain tries to create and share all the online transactions, stored in a distributed ledger, as a data structure on a network of computers. It validates the transactions using peer-to-peer network of computers. It allows users to make and verify transactions immediately without a central authority. Blockchain is a transaction database which contains information about all the transactions ever executed in the past and works on Bitcoin protocol. In this analysis paper we discussed what is Blockchain?, SWOT analysis of BC, Types of BC and how Blockchain works along with its advantages and disadvantages.

Analysis of Blockchain technology: pros, cons and SWOT

Blockchain for smart communities: Applications, challenges and opportunities

Blockchain technology has been applied in a variety of fields due to its capability of establishing trust in a decentralized fashion. However, the application of blockchain in wireless mobile networks is hindered by a major challenge brought by the proof-of-work puzzle during the mining process, which sets a high demand for the computational capability and storage availability in mobile devices. To address this problem, we propose a novel mobile edge computing (MEC) enabled wireless blockchain framework where the computation-intensive mining tasks can be offloaded to nearby edge computing nodes and the cryptographic hashes of blocks can be cached in the MEC server. Particularly, two offloading modes are considered, i.e., offloaded to the nearby access point or a group of nearby users. First, we conduct the performance analysis of each mode with stochastic geometry methods. Then, the joint offloading decision and caching strategy is formulated as an optimization problem. Furthermore, an alternating direction method of multipliers based algorithm is utilized to solve the problem in a distributed manner. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.

Computation Offloading and Content Caching in Wireless Blockchain Networks With Mobile Edge Computing

Blockchain for smart cities: A review of architectures, integration trends and future research directions

After years of tremendous development and research in digital currency, the most famous Bitcoin industry chain has been gradually completed including mining, exchange, currency exchange, ATM, pervasive digital wallet design and so on. Especially, its blockchain technology has become FinTech organizations' emerging business and research directions, also been applied in the interdisciplinary medical science, supply chain and Internet of things. Digitizing currency can solve many problems in physical currency, such as the rampant counterfeit banknotes. Thus, not only the transparency can be cost-effectively preserved in store's ledger, but also customer's rights and interests can be protected while using the digital wallet. For the government, the regulation and auditing of financial transaction can be made simpler and more convenient for tax collection issue. Digitized transaction details can be much easier to audit by any computing device than manually audit the conventional ledger books. Furthermore, to make merchandise store to use digitized currency much easier, in this paper, we propose and deploy a Bitcoin collection supervision system called BPCSS based on blockchain technology with cloud databases for customers and merchandise stores. The preliminary experimental results via the well-known pervasive digital wallet of Testnet Bitcoin demonstrate the proposed BPCSS can cost-effectively collect payment and supervise the transactions between customer and merchandise store running the implemented NFC-enabled Android Apps.

Po-Wei Chen

Papers

Blockchain-based payment collection supervision system using pervasive Bitcoin digital wallet