Blockchain has been regarded as a promising technology for Internet of Things (IoT), since it provides significant solutions for decentralized network which can address trust and security concerns, high maintenance cost problem, etc. The decentralization provided by blockchain can be largely attributed to the use of consensus mechanism, which enables peer-to-peer trading in a distributed manner without the involvement of any third party. This article starts from introducing the basic concept of blockchain and illustrating why consensus mechanism plays an indispensable role in a blockchain enabled IoT system. Then, we discuss the main ideas of two famous consensus mechanisms including Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS), and list their limitations in IoT. Next, two mainstream Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG) based consensus mechanisms, i.e., the Tangle and Hashgraph, are reviewed to show why DAG consensus is more suitable for IoT system than PoW and PoS. Potential issues and challenges of DAG based consensus mechanism to be addressed in the future are discussed in the last.

This paper considers the application of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to a multi-user network with mixed multicasting and unicasting traffic. The proposed design of beamforming and power allocation ensures that the unicasting performance is improved while maintaining the reception reliability of multicasting. Both analytical and simulation results are provided to demonstrate that the use of the NOMA assisted multicast-unicast scheme yields a significant improvement in spectral efficiency compared to orthogonal multiple access (OMA) schemes which realize multicasting and unicasting services separately. Since unicasting messages are broadcasted to all the users, how the use of NOMA can prevent those multicasting receivers intercepting the unicasting messages is also investigated, where it is shown that the secrecy unicasting rate achieved by NOMA is always larger than or equal to that of OMA. This security gain is mainly due to the fact that the multicasting messages can be used as jamming signals to prevent potential eavesdropping when the multicasting and unicasting messages are superimposed together following the NOMA principle.

In cloud radio access networks (C-RANs), a substantial amount of data must be exchanged in both backhaul and fronthaul links, which causes high power consumption and poor quality of service (QoS) experience for real-time services. To solve this problem, a cluster content caching structure is proposed in this paper, which takes full advantage of distributed caching and centralized signal processing. In particular, redundant traffic on the backhaul can be reduced because the cluster content cache provides a part of required content objects for remote radio heads (RRHs) connected to a common edge cloud. Tractable expressions for both effective capacity and energy efficiency performance are derived, which show that the proposed structure can improve QoS guarantees with a lower power cost of local storage. Furthermore, to fully explore the potential of the proposed cluster content caching structure, the joint design of resource allocation and RRH association is optimized, and two distributed algorithms are accordingly proposed. Simulation results verify the accuracy of the analytical results and show the performance gains achieved by cluster content caching in C-RANs.

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