IEEE Blockchain Technical Briefs - September 2019
A collection of short technical articles

A Consortium Blockchain-based Incentive Model for Crowdsensing

By Lijun Wei; Jing Wu; and Chengnian Long (Corresponding author), Department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Key Laboratory of System Control and Information Processing, Ministry of China

Crowdsensing is an emerging paradigm of data aggregation, which has a pivotal role in data-driven applications. It collects a large amount of sensing data by means of procurement or recruitment, which reduces the cost of data collection and improves the efficiency. With the continuous expansion of the network scale and the intelligent evolution of sensing devices, crowdsensing has a significant development in various IoT applications such as transportation, pollution measure, etc. Typical crowdsensing is composed of mostly three parts: requesters, workers and platforms.

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Blockchain Value Realization: Promises, Realities, and the Journey towards Integration and Adoption

By Hazim Dahir; and Ammar Rayes, Cisco Systems

Blockchain is not ready for prime time. You can stop reading now. However, since most people observing the momentum behind blockchain would disagree, you probably should keep reading. There is no doubt the momentum and investments are increasing, however, the integration of Blockchain into a workflow or process is where the issue is. Furthermore, there is high level of certainty that blockchain will revolutionize how we conduct business (all business).

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Proof of Prestige

By Michał Król; Alberto Sonnino; Mustafa Al-Bassam; Argyrios G. Tasiopoulos; and Ioannis Psaras, University College London (UCL)

Cryptocurrencies rely heavily on the blockchain technology that acts as a peer-to-peer, distributed database. In this database, each cryptocurrency stores essential information such as the amount of money of each user and a list of transactions. However, for the system to work correctly, the database must remain consistent across multiple copies. This is achieved by using different kinds of consensus protocols.

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Blockchain-enabled Wireless Internet of Things: Network Architecture and Performance Analysis

By Yao Sun, National Key Lab on Communications, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China; Bin Cao, State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China; Lei Zhang, James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, UK; and Muhammad Ali Imran, James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, UK

IoT is envisioned as one of the most promising technologies for constructing a global network with machines and devices which will gradually cover almost all aspects of the human life. With such an important role it plays in our life, there is a consensus that the security problem is of the first priority of IoT due to the easy accessibility and hardware/software constraints on IoT devices. Moreover, in the current centralized IoT system, due to the involvement of the third party, the high agent cost makes smart contract (such as micro payment and information exchange) among devices unattractive, and thus poses a bottleneck on the prosperous of IoT ecosystems.