AJIT: Accountable Just-in-Time Network Resource Allocation with Smart Contracts

Abstract

New applications such as remote surgery and connected cars, which are being touted as use cases for 5G and beyond, are mission-critical. As such, communications infrastructure needs to support and enforce stringent and guaranteed levels of service before such applications can take off. However, from an operator’s perspective, it can be difficult to provide uniformly high levels of service over long durations or large regions. As network conditions change over time, or when a mobile end point goes to regions with poor coverage, it may be difficult for the operator to support previously agreed upon service agreements that are too stringent. Second, from a consumer’s perspective, purchasing a stringent service level agreement with an operator can also be expensive. Finally, failures in mission critical applications can lead to disasters, so infrastructure should support assignment of liabilities when a guaranteed service level is reneged upon – this is a difficult problem because both the operator and the customer have an incentive to lay the blame on each other to avoid liabilities of poor service. To address the above problems, we propose AJIT, an architecture that allows creating fine-grained short-term contracts between operator and consumer. AJIT uses smart contracts to allow dynamically changing service levels so that more expensive and stringent levels of service need only be requested by a customer for short durations when the application needs it, and operator agrees to the SLA only when the infrastructure is able to support the demand. Second, AJIT uses trusted enclaves to do the accounting of packet deliveries such that neither the customer requesting guaranteed service levels for mission-critical applications, nor the operator providing the infrastructure support, can cheat.

Publication
Proceedings of the ACM MobiArch 2020 – The 15th Workshop on Mobility in the Evolving Internet Architecture
Tooba Faisal
Tooba Faisal
PhD Student working with Vodafone on Service Level Agreements at the Network Edge

Areas of my research are Smart Contracts, Service Level Agreements(SLAs), Blockchain technologies and their application in 5G networks. I started working on blockchain from my time at UCL, where studied Bitcoin blockchain particularly with respect to security and privacy.

Damiano Di Francesco Maesa
Damiano Di Francesco Maesa
PDRA working on distributed ledgers for 5G

I have received both his master degree (cum laude) and Ph.D in computer science from the University of Pisa. I am specialised on Bitcoin cryptocurrency analysis and blockchain technology novel applications, on which subject I have published on conference proceedings and international journals. I have held several guest lectures and seminars to spread awareness on blockchain technology. I have been an academic guest at the “Research Group for Distributed Computing (DISCO)” at ETH Zürich and a Research Affiliate of the Italian National Research Institute (CNR). I currently am a visiting Research Associate at the computer lab of the university of Cambridge, College Research Associate at Clare College in Cambridge and Reasearch Associate at Kings College London.

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