SLA-Based Sharing Economy Service with Smart Contract for Resource Integrity in the Internet of Things

Abstract

Recently, technology startups have leveraged the potential of blockchain-based technologies to govern institutions or interpersonal trust by enforcing signed treaties among different individuals in a decentralized environment. However, it is going to be hard enough convincing that the blockchain technology could completely replace the trust among trading partners in the sharing economy as sharing services always operate in a highly dynamic environment. With the rapid expanding of the rental market, the sharing economy faces more and more severe challenges in the form of regulatory uncertainty and concerns about abuses. This paper proposes an enhanced decentralized sharing economy service using the service level agreement (SLA), which documents the services the provider will furnish and defines the service standards the provider is obligated to meet. The SLA specifications are defined as the smart contract, which facilitates multi-user collaboration and automates the process with no involvement of the third party. To demonstrate the usability of the proposed solution in the sharing economy, a notebook sharing case study is implemented using the Hyperledger Fabric. The functionalities of the smart contract are tested using the Hyperledger Composer. Moreover, the efficiency of the designed approach is demonstrated through a series of experimental tests using different performance metrics.

A Survey on the Usage of Blockchain Technology for Cyber-Threats in the Context of Industry 4.0

“…Particularly, Industry 4.0 is based on the smart contract concept. A smart contract is broader than a service level agreement (SLA) and can be a guarantor of protecting a SLA specification between a provider and consumers from violation while providing the security services required by the blockchain by enforcing data integrity and trustability [16]. The stakeholders in Industry 4.0 will refer to the smart contract for satisfaction of the SLA specification.…”

“…About 12 mathematical models for solar panels are found in the literature that are applied to solar-wind hybrid systems as shown in Table 1 [3,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. For this work, the model referenced in [20][21][22] is selected because it covers most of the characteristics and it is employed in the majority of the consulted references.…”

Smart Contracts for Service-Level Agreements in Edge-to-Cloud Computing

“…Since trusting a third-party SLA management system can be difficult in reality, a blockchain-based SLA management system can aid to overcome that problem [36,37], where the blockchain offers complete transparency and SLAs are precisely declared in the SC. In addition, blockchain integration into SLA management systems can lead towards a automated, simplified and less expensive sharing of infrastructures using SLA [13] and compensation between providers and consumers in case of SLA violation [25].…”

“…It performs SLA assessment, preparation, negotiation, contracting and deployment of software components on the optimal deployment options. This scenario is executed in the following 15 consecutive steps: (1) the software engineer defines application QoS requirements and preferred usage-time for the deployment option; (2) the GUI through the triggerSC() method invokes the SC through the Metamask Ethereum bridge; (3) the SC initiates deployment process and (4) triggers the Smart Oracle through the selectDO() method; (5) the Smart Oracle gathers information on blockchain-certified deployment options and (6) triggers the decision-making mechanism; (7) the decision-making mechanism retrieves prior usage data and current monitoring metrics for the available deployment options from the Monitoring System, (8) estimates the optimal option and (9) returns the results to the Smart Oracle, which (10) triggers the SC to (11)(12)(13) verify the wallet address, executes the deployment process; (14) the Smart Oracle triggers the Kubernetes Orchestrator cluster to (15) deploy the two-tier application on the selected deployment options.…”

Reliable Task Management Based on a Smart Contract for Runtime Verification of Sensing and Actuating Tasks in IoT Environments

“…The hash of a prior block is designed to be tamper-proof; thus, the user can easily use the verification process to detect the discrepancy since a single bit change in a given block would alter all of the previous transaction logs in the block. As blockchain technology becomes more mature, use cases and applications outside of financial services are gradually being explored in various business scenarios, such as healthcare [9][10][11], IoT [12][13][14], smart grid [15][16][17], and shared economy applications [18][19][20].…”