{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,3]],"date-time":"2026-07-03T16:33:09Z","timestamp":1783096389348,"version":"3.54.6"},"reference-count":46,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"10","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2021,9,24]],"date-time":"2021-09-24T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1632441600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/100000001","name":"National Science Foundation","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["CNS-2039342"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["CNS-2039342"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/100000001","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/100000181","name":"United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["FA9550-21-1-0229"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["FA9550-21-1-0229"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/100000181","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Future Internet"],"abstract":"<jats:p>The rapid advancement in artificial intelligence (AI) and wide deployment of Internet of Video Things (IoVT) enable situation awareness (SAW). The robustness and security of IoVT systems are essential for a sustainable urban environment. While blockchain technology has shown great potential in enabling trust-free and decentralized security mechanisms, directly embedding cryptocurrency oriented blockchain schemes into resource-constrained Internet of Video Things (IoVT) networks at the edge is not feasible. By leveraging Electrical Network Frequency (ENF) signals extracted from multimedia recordings as region-of-recording proofs, this paper proposes EconLedger, an ENF-based consensus mechanism that enables secure and lightweight distributed ledgers for small-scale IoVT edge networks. The proposed consensus mechanism relies on a novel Proof-of-ENF (PoENF) algorithm where a validator is qualified to generate a new block if and only if a proper ENF-containing multimedia signal proof is produced within the current round. The decentralized database (DDB) is adopted in order to guarantee efficiency and resilience of raw ENF proofs on the off-chain storage. A proof-of-concept prototype is developed and tested in a physical IoVT network environment. The experimental results validated the feasibility of the proposed EconLedger to provide a trust-free and partially decentralized security infrastructure for IoVT edge networks.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/fi13100248","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2021,9,27]],"date-time":"2021-09-27T04:55:33Z","timestamp":1632718533000},"page":"248","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":18,"title":["EconLedger: A Proof-of-ENF Consensus Based Lightweight Distributed Ledger for IoVT Networks"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"13","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-9623-237X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Ronghua","family":"Xu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Binghamton University, SUNY, Binghamton, NY 13905, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Deeraj","family":"Nagothu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Binghamton University, SUNY, Binghamton, NY 13905, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1880-0586","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yu","family":"Chen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Binghamton University, SUNY, Binghamton, NY 13905, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2021,9,24]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Xu, R., Nikouei, S.Y., Chen, Y., Polunchenko, A., Song, S., Deng, C., and Faughnan, T.R. 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