Workshop Program

1:30 - 2:20 PM , Prof. Attila Kertesz, Software Engineering Department, University of Szeged

Integrating Fog Computing and Blockchain Technology for Applications with Enhanced Trust and Privacy

Abstract: Blockchain was first introduced in 2009 as the technology behind the Bitcoin digital currency. It is the backbone technology for many Distributed Ledger and Distributed Computing applications, such as digital cryptocurrencies and digital smart contracts. Solutions integrated with them excel the provenance of high levels of security and trust, while they guarantee immutable transactional history without the interference or control of a central authority. For more than a decade, Blockchain applications had been proposed in a wide variety of environments such as Internet of Things, Fog Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Mobile Computing, etc. The IoTCloud group at the University of Szeged, Hungary, has started to investigate Blockchain and Fog Computing integration possibilities in 2019. The advantages of Blockchain-Fog integration include enhanced security, integrity, reliability, and fault-tolerance, due to the decentralization and trust management mechanisms they provide.

In this talk, I summarize the results we achieved in Blockchain-Fog integration, then present our current works and future directions. First, we conducted a survey to highlight the roles Blockchains played in cloud and fog systems, and presented how the corresponding research communities envisage the future Blockchain-Fog integration. Based on the identified challenges, we turned our attention to address some of these issues. To enhance task scheduling in cloud systems with Blockchain-Fog extensions, we proposed an Ant Colony Optimization algorithm in a fog-enabled Blockchain-assisted scheduling model, called PF-BTS. It exploits Blockchain miners for generating efficient assignment of tasks to be executed in the cloud, and awards miner nodes for their contribution in generating the best schedule. To enable the development and evaluation of methods for Blockchain-Fog integration, we designed a special purpose simulator called FoBSim. By realizing such integration, a Blockchain can be placed in the fog layer, the end-user layer, or the cloud layer. The simulator is capable of investigating the differences of such placements, and their main properties for executing certain applications with different requirements. The simulator has different, built-in consensus algorithms and different deployment options and functionalities for Blockchain integration. In our current works, we aim at investigating Blockchain-Fog integration advantages for real-world applications. We already started to develop a Blockchain-assisted credential management system, which could be used for applications needing trustful and privacy-aware, distributed credential issuing and validation. The currently targeted use cases include international student diploma management and COVID-19 immunity passport management. In our future work, we plan to extend the FoBSim environment with additional consensus algorithms and a graphical interface to ease its utilization.

2:20 - 2:45 PM SMART: a Tool for Trust and Reputation Management in Social Media, Nishant Saurabh, Manuel Herold, Hamid Mohammadi Fard and Radu Prodan

3:10 - 3:35 PM Towards Generating Realistic Trace for Simulating Functions-as-a-Service, Dilshad Hassan Sallo and Gabor Kecskemeti

3:35 - 4:00 PM SPIRIT: A microservice-based framework for interactive Cloud infrastructure planning, Spiros Koulouzis, Riccardo Bianchi, Robin van der Linde, Yuandou Wang and Zhiming Zhao.

4:25 - 4:50 PM Data management in EpiGraph COVID-19 epidemic simulator

4:50 - 5:15 PM Merging Real Images with Physics Simulations via Data Assimilation