An exciting scholarship opportunity is available at the Trusted Networks Lab for honours/bachelors thesis students to work on implementation of our very fast blockchain called Tree-Chain. More details about the project are below. The video above provides more detail on Treechain, covering our Treechain paper at the IEEE ICBC conference in May 2021
In recent years, blockchain adaptation in IoT has received tremendous attention due to its salient features including distributed management, security, anonymity, and auditability. However, conventional blockchains are significantly resource demanding and suffer from lack of throughput, delay in committing transactions, and low efficiency. We recently introduced a novel blockchain consensus algorithm known as Tree-chain, that bases the validator selection on an existing feature in all blockchains: hash function. Tree-chain achieves a fast throughput while ensuring the randomness and unpredictability of the validators and thus protecting the security of the architecture. Tree-chain moves away from eventual consistency as in conventional blockchains, to near-immediate consistency as the validator of each transaction is always known.
The main objective of this project is to implement a Proof of Concept (PoC) implementation of Tree-chain to benchmark the performance including resource consumption, throughput, and delay in committing transactions. We are seeking motivated students with strong programming skills that are familiar with basic networking and security concepts and preferably socket programming. We will build a Tree-chain from scratch using Java programming language and test using Raspberry Pi devices. By the end of the project we expect to have a working prototype of Tree-chain on Raspberry Pi devices along with an evaluation of the performance.