Byzantine-Resilient Real-Time Reliable Broadcast on Partially Connected Topology Cases

Increasing digitalisation of society due to technical advancement has increased the appearance and size of cyber- physical systems. These systems require real-time reliable control, which comes with its challenges. These systems need reliable communication despite the presence of attacks or faulty processes and bad connections, which can disrupt...

Coordinate Routing in the Lightning Network

Blockchains such as the Bitcoin facilitate the online transaction between users without an intermediate financial institution and can serve as a global currency. However, at the moment, blockchain solutions are suffering from low transaction throughput and high delays. For instance, the bitcoin network processes at most 7 transactions per second...

Autonomous Exploration by Cooperative Robots

Imagine being lost in a desert with a bunch of friends, all of a sudden. Survival will be difficult. You will have mirages, distrust among friends and no means to leave landmarks on the sand. Unable to locate yourself, you will have no means to contact people with maps. The best you can do in such a situation is to stay together in the vicinity...

Creating an online auctioning clock

For this project, JEM-id tasked us with creating a proof of concept of a new online auction in the form of a web application for Royal FloraHolland. JEM-id is a software company operating in the agricultural domain.<br/>The pre-existing digital auction is not available as a web application and has generated technical debt over the past twenty...

MultiProxy: a collaborative approach to censorship circumvention

In recent years, many countries and administrative domains exploit control over their communication infrastructures to censor online materials. The concrete reasons behind the Internet censorship remain poorly understood due to the opaque nature of the systems. Generally, Internet censorship is to disrupt the free flow of information. It involves...

Communicating with low latency peers: Building a low latency overlay in P2P networks

In decentralized applications requirements on latency are high. For instance, in trading<br/>applications a millisecond latency advantage can save companies millions of dollars. In<br/>this thesis a design is proposed for an overlay in a decentralized peer-to-peer system<br/>that lowers the latency between connected peers. The overlay is...

Design and Experimental Evaluation of a System based on Dynamic Conits for Scaling Minecraft-like Environments

Minecraft is one of the most popular games of all time,<br/>and provides both entertainment and education to people around the globe.<br/>One of the main challenges in gaming is increasing the scalability of these games to support the large numbers of players they attract.<br/>Minecraft-like games make this challenge even more difficult by...

A Blockchain Consensus Protocol With Horizontal Scalability

Blockchain systems have the potential to decentralise many traditionally centralised systems. However, scalability remains a key challenge. Without a horizontally scalable solution, where performance increases by adding more nodes to the system, blockchain systems remain unsuitable for ubiquitous use. We design a novel blockchain system called...

Sybil-resistant trust mechanisms in distributed systems

In this thesis, the problem of estimating trust in distributed systems is considered. Distributed systems can be virtual or real-world systems in which multiple agents interact. One of the biggest problems in distributed systems is that they only function well if everyone contributes some resources. If agents do not participate, or try to...

Automatic Discovery of Distributed Algorithms for Large-Scale Systems

In recent years, large-scale systems have become mainstream at a very high pace. Typical examples of large-scale systems are MANETs, Wireless Sensor Networks, Pervasive Computing, Swarm Robotics, etc. These systems distinguish them- selves by the large number of devices they embody, and emergent behaviors they exhibit: Behavior that is globally...