Dr Sujit Biswas

Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain (BC) technologies have been dominating their respective research domains for some time. IoT offers automation at the finest level in different fields, while BC provides secure transaction processing for asset exchanges. The capability of IoT devices to generate transactions prompts their integration with BC as the next logical step. The biggest challenges in this integration are the scalability of ledger and rate of transaction execution in BC. On one hand, due to their large numbers, IoT devices will generate transactions at a rate that current blockchain solutions cannot handle. On the other hand, implementing BC peers onto IoT devices is impossible due to resource constraints. This prohibits direct integration of both technologies in their current state. In this paper, we propose a solution to address these challenges by using a local peer network to bridge the gap. It restricts the number of transactions which enters the global BC by implementing a scalable local ledger, without compromising on the peer validation of transactions at local and global level. The testbed evaluations show a significant reduction in the block weight and ledger size on global peers. The solution also indirectly improves the transaction processing rate of all peers due to load distribution.

Efficient and smart business processes are heavily dependent on the Internet of Things (IoT) networks, where end-to-end optimization is critical to the success of the whole ecosystem. These systems, including industrial, healthcare, and others, are large-scale complex networks of heterogeneous devices. This introduces many security and access control challenges. Blockchain has emerged as an effective solution for addressing several such challenges. However, the basic algorithms used in the business blockchain are not feasible for large-scale IoT systems. To make them scalable for IoT, the complex consensus-based security has to be downgraded. In this article, we propose a novel lightweight proof of block and trade (PoBT) consensus algorithm for IoT blockchain and its integration framework. This solution allows the validation of trades as well as blocks with reduced computation time. Also, we present a ledger distribution mechanism to decrease the memory requirements of IoT nodes. The analysis and evaluation of security aspects, computation time, memory, and bandwidth requirements show significant improvement in the performance of the overall system.

 (IoT) has gained extensive attention from industry and academia alike in past decade. The connectivity of each and every piece of technology in the environment with Internet, has opened many avenues of research and development. Applications, algorithms, trust models, devices, all have evolved to accommodate the demands of user needs in the most optimal way possible. However, one thing still remains constant: host-centric communication. It is the most predominant way of communication in Internet today. With evolution of everything else, host based communication has been stretched to limits, and exploration of new models have been underway for sometime. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a major contender for the future Internet architecture, where content is the basic element regardless of its location (host). It intends to offer in-network caching, inherent mobility, , and content based security as part of design and not add-on functionality. In recent years, numerous efforts have been made to integrate IoT with ICN as the communication model. In this paper, we provide a detailed and systematic review of IoT–ICN research. We investigate ICN as communication enabler for IoT domain specific use cases, and the use of ICN features for the benefit of IoT networks. These include  & content naming, discovery, and caching. We also survey synchronization, interoperability, publish/subscribe communication, quality of service, security, and mobility of IoT devices with ICN perspectives. The paper also presents challenges and possible research directions for the benefit of community.

Software Defined Network implementation has seen tremendous growth and deployment in different types of networks. Compared to traditional networks it decouples the control logic from network layer devices and centralizes it for efficient traffic forwarding and flow management across the domain. This multi-layered architecture has data forwarding devices at the bottom in the data plane, which is programmed by controllers in the control plane. The high-level management plane interacts with the control plane to program the whole network and enforce different policies. The interaction among these planes is done through interfaces that work as communication/programming protocols. In this survey, we present a comprehensive study of these interface and programming protocols, which are primarily classified into southbound, northbound, and east/westbound interfaces. This work first classifies each of them into subcategories and then presents a comprehensive comparative analysis. As the different interfaces have different properties, hence, the sub-classification and their analysis are done using different properties. In addition, we also discuss the impact of different virtualization techniques, such as hypervisors, on interface protocols and inter-plane communication. More over specialized interfaces for emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things and wireless sensor networks are also presented. Finally, the paper highlights several short term and long term research challenges and open issues specific to the SDN interface protocols.

E-health systems have witnessed widespread usage in the last few years, mainly due to advancements in health monitoring hardware and the availability of remote diagnostic services. Given the numerous benefits, there are two main challenges: management of the e-health ecosystem and security and privacy of sensitive data. The former results from nonunified, redundant, and often replicated information across numerous independent e-health service providers. While the later stems from sensitive information stored in centralized systems that can be compromised. Blockchain has emerged as a promising technology, which can be used to secure access and privacy of data and provide an umbrella management solution to large-scale distributed and decentralized enterprise systems. In this article, we present a unified system for migrating independent conventional e-health systems to a single blockchain-based ecosystem. More specifically, we address the issues of difference in data structures for conventional relational databases and blockchain file databases. The solution describes the conversion process and synchronization of information in a unified system for large-scale e-health data. The implementation and analysis show that significant improvements in data storage, access control, and seamless migration can be achieved.

The use of IoT and modern technologies has boosted the expansion of e-health solutions significantly and allowed access to better health services and remote monitoring of patients. Every service provider usually implements its information system to manage and access patient data for its unique purpose. Hence, interoperability among independent e-health service providers is still a major challenge. From the structure of stored data to its large volume, the design of each such big data system varies, hence cooperation among different e-health systems is impossible. In addition to this, the security and privacy of patient information is a challenging task. Building a unified solution for all creates significant business and economic issues. In this work, we present a solution to migrate existing e-health systems to a unified Blockchain-based model, where access to large scale medical data of patients can be achieved seamlessly by any service provider. A core blockchain network connects individual & independent e-health systems without requiring them to modify their internal processes. Access to patient data in the form of digital assets stored in off-chain storage is controlled through patient-centric channels and policy transactions. e show that the proposed solution can interconnect different e-health systems efficiently.

Blockchain as a distributed ledger technology can be very effective in providing access control and big data management in health-care systems. Because implementing or migrating to a pure blockchain solution is an extremely challenging task, several design and implementation dynamics should be considered.

Contagious diseases are prevalent even in the current era of advanced technology. A uniformed initiative is required to build a reliable interactive information exchange service targeting vaccination data management and other medical services. The conventional data exchange mechanism is centralized, creating many vulnerable issues such as a single point failure, data leakage, access control, etc. This article introduces a Blockchain-based medical data-sharing framework (called GlobeChain) to overcome the technical challenges to handle the outbreak records. The challenges that might arise due to the proposed Blockchain-based framework are also presented as a future direction that grabs the proposal's effectiveness.

Internet of Things (IoT) and Network Softwarization are fast becoming core technologies of information systems and network management for the next-generation Internet. The deployment and applications of IoT range from smart cities to urban computing and from ubiquitous healthcare to tactile Internet. For this reason, the physical infrastructure of heterogeneous network systems has become more complicated and thus requires efficient and dynamic solutions for management, configuration, and flow scheduling. Network softwarization in the form of Software Defined Networks and Network Function Virtualization has been extensively researched for IoT in the recent past. In this article, we present a systematic and comprehensive review of virtualization techniques explicitly designed for IoT networks. We have classified the literature into software-defined networks designed for IoT, function virtualization for IoT networks, and software-defined IoT networks. These categories are further divided into works that present architectural, security, and management solutions. Besides, the article highlights several short-term and long-term research challenges and open issues related to the adoption of software-defined Internet of Things.

COVID-19 is a global epidemic. Till now, there is no remedy for this epidemic. However, isolation and social distancing are seemed to be effective preventive measures to control this pandemic. Therefore, in this article, an optimization problem is formulated that accommodates both isolation and social distancing features of the individuals. To promote social distancing, we solve the formulated problem by applying a noncooperative game that can provide an incentive for maintaining social distancing to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Furthermore, the sustainability of the lockdown policy is interpreted with the help of our proposed game-theoretic incentive model for maintaining social distancing where there exists a Nash equilibrium. Finally, we perform an extensive numerical analysis that shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of achieving the desired social-distancing to prevent the outbreak of the COVID-19 in a noncooperative environment. Numerical results show that the individual incentive increases more than 85% with an increasing percentage of home isolation from 25% to 100% for all considered scenarios. The numerical results also demonstrate that in a particular percentage of home isolation, the individual incentive decreases with an increasing number of individuals.

Mobile applications & smart devices have drastically changed our routine tasks, and have become an integral part of modern society. Along with the numerous benefits we get, major challenges like privacy and safety have become complicated than before. The permission based system for mobile applications is designed to empower the user to decide which resources and information they want the application to access. Most of these permissions are granted during installation of application, but our study shows that the users make weak decisions in protecting their information. Majority of the users, even with technical backgrounds, blindly grant all permissions requested by the application even if they are not necessary for the application to run. In order to give more control to the user, and to enable them to make informed decisions regarding permission, we have proposed a Privacy Permission Policy Framework in this paper. This framework enables the user to have greater control over the permission granting while installing the mobile applications. The implementation and testing of the framework also enabled us to run forensic analysis and understand the scope of permissions requested, based on which this framework can advise the user to select minimum required permissions for the application to work. This makes the users’ privacy more secure, and grants full control over the process.

Software-Defined Networking has become an integral technology for large scale networks that require dynamic flow management. It separates the control function from data plane devices and centralizes it in a domain controller. However, only a limited number of switches can be managed by a single and centralized controller which introduces challenges such as scalability, reliability, and availability. Distributed controller architecture resolves these issues but also introduces new challenges of uneven load and traffic management across domains. As real-world networks have redundant links, hence a significant challenge is to distribute traffic flows on multiple paths, within a domain, and across multiple independent domains. The selection of ingress and egress switches becomes even more problematic if the intermediate domain is non-cooperative. In this work, we propose a Dynamically Optimized and Load-balanced Path for Inter-domain (DOLPHIN) communication system, a customized solution for different SDN controllers. It provides control beyond the virtual switch elements in intra and inter-domain communication and extends the range of programmability to wireless devices, such as the Internet of Things or vehicular networks. Extensive simulation results show that the traffic load is distributed evenly on multiple links connecting different domains. We model data center communication and 5G vehicular network communication to show that, by load balancing the flow completion times of the different types of network traffic can be significantly improved.