Automated Quality of Service Monitoring for 5G and Beyond Using Distributed Ledgers

Abstract

The viability of new mission-critical networked applications such as connected cars or remote surgery is heavily dependent on the availability of truly customized network services at a Quality of Service (QoS) level that both the network operator and the customer can agree on. This is difficult to achieve in today’s mainly ``best effort’’ Internet. Even if a level of service were to be agreed upon between a consumer and an operator, it is important for both parties to be able to scalably and impartially monitor the quality of service delivered in order to enforce the service level agreement (SLA). Building upon a recently proposed architecture for automated negotiation of SLAs using smart contracts, we develop a low overhead solution for monitoring these SLAs and arranging automated payments based on the smart contracts. Our solution uses cryptographically secure bloom filters to create succinct summaries of the data exchanged over fine-grained epochs. We then use a state channel-based design for both parties to quickly and scalably agree and sign off on the data that was delivered in each epoch, making it possible to monitor and enforce at run time the agreed upon QoS levels.

Publication
Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS)
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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