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NKN (New Kind of Network)

by crypto passionMarch 17th, 2018

Too Long; Didn't Read

DISCLAIMER: I am in no way associated with the NKN team. Neither am I a financial advisor, nor is this meant to be financial advice. Whatever follows, just reflects my understanding of the project, and my personal opinion on its future outlook.

featured image - NKN (New Kind of Network)

DISCLAIMER: I am in no way associated with the NKN team. Neither am I a financial advisor, nor is this meant to be financial advice. Whatever follows, just reflects my understanding of the project, and my personal opinion on its future outlook.

This article describes the motivations, goals and workings of NKN.NKN aims to create decentralised internet by creating its own blockchain.

Motivations

Current day internet suffers from some of the below mentioned issues:

Privacy — Ability to protect PII(Personally Identifiable Information such as name, address etc) as well as user behaviour when visiting website.
Network Fragmentation — Idea that internet will be split into small segments and each segment will be disconnected from each other thus threatening the whole idea of world wide web.
Net Neutrality — Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should not block or throttle any data on internet based on location, content, application so on and so forth.
Insufficient Usage Of Network — Wasting your available bandwidth for data transfer.
Selective Propagation — Where only some data is allowed to be transmitted on the network, while the rest is censored.

Introducing NKN

NKN (New Kind of Network) is aimed at tackling all the above mentioned challenges and much more. It uses secure tunneling on top of tcp/ip stack to transmit data without altering the underlying mechanism on internet connectivity.

It is a blockchain in its own right but designed in such a way that it can replace networking stack of any existing blockchain as well. It uses cellular automata to achieve consensus.

Vision Of NKN

NKN tries to exploit the 3rd dimension of internet infrastructure i.e, network. As you can see, as of today we have seen innovations and blockchains based on compute and storage dimension.

Building blocks

Following are the building blocks of the NKN blockchain.

Building blocks

Networks Layer: NKN network layer overlays IP layer of OSI model and creates a secure/insecure tunnel between peers. Based on the rules of cellular automata, a dynamic topology of network is created to transmit data.

Consensus Layer: NKN uses cellular automata driven consensus called Proof Of Relay. This takes into consideration how your node bandwidth is and how connected you are for transmitting data.

Incentive Layer: You will be rewarded tokens as an incentive to be online and for providing connectivity and transmission power.

Application Layer: Contains the Distributed Applications (dApps) from application developer using the networking toolkit released by NKN, making applications very fast and scalable by making use of the networking layer.

Cellular Automata (CA)

CA is used as foundation for NKN. CA is a state machine where nodes have defined local rules which depends on only neighbouring nodes. They change their state only based on that. This will in turn affect the global network topology.

Check out the following video which shows evolution of the cells with predefined rules in conways game of life.

Applying the above principles to blockchain, Cellular Automata Of Network (CAoN) in a blockchain system where blocks are being generated.

Each time a block is received, the node updates its state and sends the block to the neighbours with digital signature. The neighbours will decide whetherto forward the message depending on their states.It can receive block in valid state or in conflicted state.Decision making process happens and it affects the the topology of the entire network without changing the physical layer or the underlying protocol of the network.

Consensus Mechanism

As you might be aware, there are various consensus algorithms being implemented in current day blockchains like PoW (Proof Of Work), PoS (Proof Of Stake), DPoS (Delegated Proof Of Stake), PoA (Proof Of Authority)so on and so forth which are briefly explained this nice article.

NKN, however, uses the ProofOfRelay(PoR) consensus mechanism that encourages participants that encourages participants to contribute to blockchain network by sharing their connectivity and bandwidth to get rewards, enhancing network connectivity and data transmission capacity. PoR is a useful Proof of Work (PoW) and it does not waste computing resources by making participants solve hashing computation.

Comparison to existing solution

Its outside the scope of this article to discuss and compare existing “similar” solutions but I am going to quote NKN team members on this.

People often ask us, what is different about NKN compared to BlockMesh and RightMesh. The latter two are entirely focusing on mobile phones and using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi Direct. NKN intend to change the entire Internet, including fixed and mobile, phones, laptops, edge and core network. NKN is a protocol overlay that is independent of the underlying physical communication media, and transparent to applications.

In addition, BlockMesh and RightMesh are all based on Ethereum, ERC-20 tokens and smart contracts. NKN will have its own blockchain technology that will have fundamentally new Proof of Relay and new consensus algorithms that will be newly developed specifically for tokenizing the network transmission capabilities. Our core developers are going a bit extra nerdy here. And if you are technology details oriented, you are welcome to read up on Cellular Automata and Conway’s Game of Life. 🙂

The second difference also applies to Orchid Protocol, which is an evolved TOR with Ethereum. And NKN believe we have a much broader scope: we want to tokenize networking like what IPFS did to storage. Our target is the 1 trillion dollar communications business, and how we can provide better connectivity to everyone by incentivize the sharing of unused networking resources, expanding and upgrading the sharing network.

Roadmap

Advisors And Team

If Cellular automata is one of the key features and innovation from NKN, the other one which stands out is the star studded team and an advisors they have.

Founding Members:

Yanbo Li: Open source guru and co-founder of onchain. More info about onchain and neo can be found here.

Linux Kernel network subsystem code contributor.

He Founded and led Onchain Beijing office and developed open source blockchain platform DNA (Distributed Network Architecture).

He Studied in Stanford and has an outstanding background in cryptography.

He has more than 10 years of R&D experience at Nokia, Qualcomm, specialising in software architecture design of distributed network system and implementation of Mesh network protocol.

Bruce Z. Li: He is a technologist with innovation foresight and business acumen.

He is a serial entrepreneur at Nokia and Google: founded and led multi-million dollar startup projects in mobile wireless and software; managed large R&D teams across US, EU and China.

He has Master’s degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Australian National University.

He has Published 4 patents, 2 papers and 1 book.

He is Based in San Francisco Bay Area.

Justin Wang: He is Distinguished technologist, prolific inventor, and industry influencer with 45 international patents (issued and pending) in wireless communication, IoT, Cloud computing and Blockchain domains.

He has 10+ years’ experience in technology innovation and development for Nokia, Microsoft and Ericsson.

He is sole author of two globally published technology textbooks with Artech House.

He has won R&D innovation award for Nokia in 2014, Microsoft in 2015, Ericsson in 2017.

Yilun Zhang: He has Ph.D. in physics at University of California San Diego, B.S. in physics at Peking University.

He is Domain expert with deep understanding and extensive study of Cellular Automata using Ising Model in physics, Hopfield Network in computer science, and recurrent neural network in neuroscience as mathematical tools, studying computational neuroscience.

He is based in San Francisco Bay Area.

NKN has a large team, with 8 more team members, and their past experiences detailed on their team page.Its impressive for a project to have such a big team before ICO (Initial Coin Offering) phase.

Now this one is big. They have Whitfield Diffie, the public key cryptographic guru himself on their advisory board. More information about him can be found here.