How to Request Network Resources Just-in-Time using Smart Contracts

Abstract

5G promises unprecedented levels of network connectivity to handle diverse applications, including life-critical applications such as remote surgery. However, to enable the adoption of such applications, it is important that customers trust the service quality provided. This can only be achieved through transparent Service Level Agreements~(SLAs). Current resource provisioning systems are too general to handle such variety in applications. Moreover, service agreements are often opaque to customers, which can be an obstacle for 5G adoption for mission-critical services. In this work, we advocate short-term and specialised rather than long-term general service contracts and propose an end-to-end Permissioned Distributed Ledger (PDL) focused architecture; which allows operators to advertise their service contracts on a public portal backed by a PDL. These service contracts with clear Service Level Agreement~(SLA) offers are deployed as smart contracts to enable transparent, automatic and immutable SLAs. To justify our choice of using a permissioned ledger instead of permissionless, we evaluated and compared contract execution times on both permissioned (i.e. Quorum and Hyperledger Fabric) and permissionless (i.e. Ropsten testnet) ledgers.

Publication
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)
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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