Distributed ledger technologies, such as blockchain systems, have in recent years emerged as promising platforms for machine-to-machine commerce and other forms of multistakeholder applications. However, despite the potential demonstrated by projects such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Hyperledger Fabric, the disk space typically required to host a copy of a ledger may be prohibitively large for many categories of devices. In this paper, we introduce an approach for reducing ledger size in blockchain systems, based on arbitrary pruning predicate functions, allowing each network participant to independently select and remove any already applied transactions. We also show that if only pruning certain ledger transactions, the ability to derive an unmodified state data structure from the remaining transactions is maintained. The approach is validated through a supply chain use case utilizing a modified version of Hyperledger Fabric, in which ledger size is reduced by about 84.49% via selective transaction pruning.
The rise of distributed ledger technologies, such as R3 Corda, Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum, has lead to a surge of interest in digitalizing different forms of contractual cooperation. By allowing for ledgers of collaboration-critical data to be reliably maintained between stakeholders without intermediaries, these solutions might enable unprecedented degrees of automation across organizational boundaries, which could have major implications for supply chain integration, medical journal sharing and many other use cases. However, these technologies tend to break with prevailing business practices by relying on code-as-contracts and distributed consensus algorithms, which can impose disruptive requirements on contract language, cooperation governance and interaction privacy. In this paper, we show how our Exchange Network architecture could be applied to avoid these disruptors. To be able to reason about the adequacy of our architecture, we present six requirements for effective contractual collaboration, which notably includes negotiable terms and effective adjudication. After outlining the architecture and our implementation of it, we describe how the latter meets our requirements by facilitating (1) negotiation, (2) user registries, (3) ownership ledgers and (4) definition sharing, as well as by only replicating ledgers between stakeholder pairs. To show how our approach compares to other solutions, we also consider how Corda, Fabric and Ethereum meet our requirements. We conclude that digital negotiation and ownership could replace many proposed uses of code-as-contracts for better compatibility with current contractual practices, as well as noting that distributed consensus algorithms are not mandatory for digital cooperation.
Many use cases coming out of initiatives such as Industry 4.0 and Ubiquitous Computing require that systems be able to cooperate by negotiating about and agreeing on the exchange of arbitrary values. While solutions able to facilitate such negotiation exist, they tend to either be domain-specific or lack mechanisms for non-repudiation, which make them unfit for the heterogeneity and scale of many compelling applications. In this paper, we present the Exchange Network, a generalpurpose and implementation-independent architecture for digital negotiation and non-repudiable exchanges of tokens, which are symbolic representations of arbitrary values. We consider the implications of implementing the architecture in three different ways, using a common database, a blockchain, and our own Signature Chain data structure, which we also describe. We demonstrate the feasibility of the architecture by outlining our own implementation of it and also describe a supply-chain scenario inspired by one transportation process at Volvo Trucks.
Recent years have seen a surge of interest in using IoT systems for an increasingly diverse set of applications, with use cases ranging from medicine to mining. Due to the disparate needs of these applications, vendors are adopting a growing number of messaging protocols, encodings and semantics, which result in poor interoperability unless systems are explicitly designed to work together. Key efforts, such as Industry 4.0, put heavy emphasis on being able to compose arbitrary IoT systems to create emergent applications, which makes mitigating this barrier to interoperability a significant objective. In this paper, we present a theoretical method for translating message payloads in transit between endpoints, complementing previous work on protocol translation. The method involves representing and analyzing encoding syntaxes with the aim of identifying the concrete translations that can be performed without risk of syntactic data loss. While the method does not facilitate translation between all possible encodings or semantics, we believe that it could be extended to enable such translation.
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