Management Science Seminar: Fair Rate Control for Distributed Ledger Technologies in the Internet of Things

Event Date: 31 January 2020

Speaker:  Wolfgang Welz, Senior Research Engineer at IOTA Foundation, Berlin, Germa

Location: Strathclyde Business School, Cathedral Wing, CW507a

Time: 11am-12noon

Abstract: Throughput is a key feature for any blockchain technology. Due to limited resources, such as bandwidth or computational power, and in order to prevent spam and denial of service attacks, mechanisms need to be implemented that control the rate in which transactions can be issued to the network. In this talk, we discuss two aspects of such a rate control mechanism, namely spam protection and congestion control.
Distributed ledger technologies are revolutionizing the way we look at distributed systems and well known networking problems need to be revisited under a different point of view. The existing extensive research on the topics does not necessarily guarantee that the same solutions can also be applied in the context of distributed ledger technologies. In fact, some technologies, such as the IOTA Tangle, are designed specifically to be used in the context of the Internet of Things as well as micro transactions. In this context, we propose an anti spam mechanism based on the solution of a cryptographic puzzle: When a participant wants to issue a transaction, the difficulty of the puzzle is adjusted dynamically in such a way that fairness can be guaranteed for any node even with low computational power. For the congestion control we present a modification of the well studied additive-increase/multiplicative-decrease (AIMD) algorithm, adapted to the special requirements of a distributed ledger network.

Bio: Dr Wolfgang Welz is a Senior Research Engineer at IOTA Foundation, Berlin, Germany. He received his PhD in Mathematics from Technische Universität Berlin in 2014. After his PhD he worked as a researcher and optimization consultant at Atesio GmbH a spin-off company of the Zuse Institute Berlin focusing on planning, configuring and optimizing telecommunication networks. He joined the IOTA Foundation in 2018 where he is supporting general research on distributed ledger technologies and the IOTA protocol.

Published: 21 January 2020