CNS Core: Small: Towards Internet-scale Permissioned Blockchain Infrastructure for the Mobile Internet

The project centers around Saguaro, a hierarchical permissioned blockchain system designed specifically for wide area networks with mobile nodes. Saguaro explores infrastructural design and systems models that are essential for realizing an Internet-scale hierarchical blockchain design compatible with modern 5G networks and beyond. Saguaro aims to provide a suite of consensus protocols to process transactions within and across domains with nodes that might follow different failure models.

Saguaro will be topology-aware and will leverage the hierarchical structure of Internet-scale mobile networks to establish consensus on cross-domain transactions efficiently. To establish delay-tolerant mobile consensus, the project will explore novel consensus protocols that rely on communication between edge servers of local and remote domains to share a compressed version of the node's history.

5G's low latency, ultra-high reliability, and device to device communication, together with blockchains' transparency, immutability, provenance, and authenticity, reflect the immense potential of running a new generation of real-time data transactional applications on the mobile Internet. Saguaro will unlock the potential of a hierarchical permissioned blockchain designed specifically for edge and fog computing environments, targeting use cases ranging from mobile delay-tolerant micropayments in development countries, accountable edge applications and accountable cloud infrastructures.

An affordable online for-credit master's course in Blockchain combining transaction processing and cryptography will be delivered at-scale, aimed at increasing accessibility of extremely high quality computer science education to all.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.