Blockchain Technologies and Decentralized Applications in Smart Environments

Dear Colleagues,

Advances in microelectronics led to the development of small in size devices that can sense, act, and create ecosystems by interacting with legacy and contemporary ICT systems, as well as by being embedded in objects making them able to communicate. Such devices can be used to form self-organized networks blended in everyday life. These ecosystems can further be connected with each other to create large federations fulfilling common purposes, realizing smart environments. Smart environments combine many diverse technologies striving to offer their inhabitants the maximum of comfort and satisfying experience, as well as the ability to promote everyday life and independent living. Thus, smart environments provide a fertile ground for developing distributed and decentralized applications that produce and consume large amounts of data whilst the demand of small access times is rapidly increasing. Nevertheless, there are many challenges towards achieving such ideal environment settings, mainly due to the large volumes of data generated, processed, and communicated, as well as due to the security hazards involved.

In the past, maintaining, controlling, and monitoring smart environments required central orchestration of participating ICT systems and networks, as well as adequate data stores. While centralization enables administrators to reduce maintenance time and complexity, on the downside, central authorities need to be trusted, be always available and capable of bearing the burden of operating in such large environments. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), and its main incarnation, Blockchains, led to a new vision of designing decentralized applications with no loss in trust and with the ability to perform secure transactions. Although initially developed to support cryptocurrencies, current research has shown that blockchain technologies can also be used to push and support decentralization in a broad application domain like medical applications, supply chains, IoT operations, security services, etc. Blockchains can increase efficiency and create new opportunities if combined with various industries and services. Access control, data sharing, and interoperability are only a few of the additional issues that need to be addressed by blockchain proposals in order to provide a seamless yet efficient, integrated solution towards achieving the envisaged goal of smart environments.

This Special Issue aims to provide insights, use cases, and novel paradigms where blockchain technologies are utilized towards proposing decentralized applications (DApps) to provide novel solutions for contemporary problems. Some specific topics include but are not limited to:

• Blockchain-related algorithms and methods
• Time scalability and speed of transaction validation in blockchain
• Consensus mechanisms with optimal energy consumption
• Storage scalability with emphasis on access speed and privacy protection
• Standardization for achieving interoperability among various blockchains
• Frameworks, methodologies and tools to minimize errors in DApps, while assisting developers towards making them more efficient
• Blockchain security and privacy
• Access control (authentication, authorization, and accounting) in DApps with privacy preservation
• Digital Identity approaches
• Smart contract paradigms
• Blockchain integration in smart environments
• Blockchain-based provision of security and accounting services
• Blockchain-based optimization of supply chain operations
• Optimize information storage in blockchain
• DApps utilizing multiple chains
• Novel DApps in healthcare, smart homes, assisted living, retail, power grids, smart cities or similar smart environments

Prof. Dr. Ioannis Mavridis
Dr. Spyros Voulgaris
Dr. Panagiotis Fouliras
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Blockchain
• Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)
• DApps
• Smart contracts
• Trusted private identities
• Incentivization
• Access Control
• Smart environments
• Multiple chains
• Security
• Privacy