Web3 Sybil avoidance using network latency

Web3 is emerging as the new Internet-interaction model that facilitates direct collaboration between strangers without a need for prior trust between network participants and without central authorities. However, one of its shortcomings is the lack of a defense mechanism against the ability of a single user to generate a surplus of identities,...

Resilient, Auditable and Secure IoT-Enabled Smart Inverter Firmware Amendments With Blockchain

The solar industry in residential areas has been witnessing an astonishing growth worldwide. At the heart of this transformation, affecting the edge of the electricity grid, reside smart inverters (SIs). These IoT-enabled devices aim to introduce a certain degree of intelligence to conventional inverters by integrating various grid support...

A Taxonomy and Lessons Learned From Blockchain Adoption Within the Internet of Energy Paradigm

The concept of the internet of energy (IoE) emerged as an innovative paradigm to encompass all the complex and intertwined notions relevant to the transition of current smart grids towards more decarbonization, digitalization and decentralization. With a focus on the two last aspects, the amount of intelligent devices being connected in a...

A novel decentralized platform for peer-to-peer energy trading market with blockchain technology

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) energy trading, which allows energy consumers/producers to directly trade with each other, is one of the new paradigms driven by the decarbonization, decentralization, and digitalization of the energy supply chain. Additionally, the rise of blockchain technology suggests unprecedented socio-economic benefits for energy...

Network-Aware Locality Scheduling for Distributed Data Operators in Data Centers

Large data centers are currently the mainstream infrastructures for big data processing. As one of the most fundamental tasks in these environments, the efficient execution of distributed data operators (e.g., join and aggregation) are still challenging current data systems, and one of the key performance issues is network communication time....

Fair multiple-workflow scheduling with different quality-of-service goals

Cloud schedulers that allocate resources exclusively to single workflows are not work-conserving as they may be forced to leave gaps in their schedules because of the precedence constraints in the workflows. Thus, they may lead to a waste of financial resources. This problem can be mitigated by multiple-workflow schedulers that share the...

An Experimental Performance Evaluation of Autoscalers for Complex Workflows

Elasticity is one of the main features of cloud computing allowing customers to scale their resources based on the workload. Many autoscalers have been proposed in the past decade to decide on behalf of cloud customers when and how to provision resources to a cloud application based on the workload utilizing cloud elasticity features. However,...

When Game Becomes Life: The Creators and Spectators of Online Game Replays and Live Streaming

Online gaming franchises such as World of Tanks, Defense of the Ancients, and StarCraft have attracted hundreds of millions of users who, apart from playing the game, also socialize with each other through gaming and viewing gamecasts. As a form of User Generated Content (UGC), gamecasts play an important role in user entertainment and gamer...

Socializing by Gaming: Revealing Social Relationships in Multiplayer Online Games

Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs) like Defense of the Ancients and StarCraft II have attracted hundreds of millions of users who communicate, interact, and socialize with each other through gaming. In MOGs, rich social relationships emerge and can be used to improve gaming services such as match recommendation and game population retention, which...

Area of Simulation: Mechanism and Architecture for Multi-Avatar Virtual Environments

Although Multi-Avatar Distributed Virtual Environments (MAVEs) such as Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games entertain daily hundreds of millions of online players, their current designs do not scale. For example, even popular RTS games such as the StarCraft series support in a single game instance only up to 16 players and only a few hundreds of...

Estimating user interaction strength in distributed online networks

User interactions are indispensable for any online network to thrive, especially for BitTorrent‐like and Web real‐time communication‐based distributed online networks that rely on users' collective contributions instead of the help of central servers. User interactions provide fine‐grained information for many applications, such as security...

User behaviors in private BitTorrent communities

Many private BitTorrent communities employ Sharing Ratio Enforcement<br/>(SRE) schemes to incentivize users to contribute. It has been demonstrated<br/>that users in private communities are highly dedicated and that they seed much<br/>longer than users in communities where SRE is not employed. While most pre-<br/>vious studies focus on showing...

Systemic risk and user-level performance in private P2P communities

Many peer-to-peer communities, including private BitTorrent Communities that serve hundreds of thousands of users, utilize<br/>credit-based or sharing ratio enforcement schemes to incentivize their members to contribute. In this paper, we analyze the performance<br/>of such communities from both the system-level and the user-level perspectives....

Pirates and Samaritans: A decade of measurements on peer production and their implications for net neutrality and copyright