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

TY - CHAP

T1 - AJIT

T2 - 15th ACM Workshop on Mobility in the Evolving Internet Architecture, MobiArch 2020 - Part of Mobicom 2020

AU - Faisal, Tooba

AU - Di Francesco Maesa, Damiano

AU - Sastry, Nishanth

AU - Mangiante, Simone

PY - 2020/9/21

Y1 - 2020/9/21

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - DLTs

KW - PDLs

KW - SLAs

KW - Smart Contracts

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85093362769&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/3411043.3412506

DO - 10.1145/3411043.3412506

M3 - Conference paper

AN - SCOPUS:85093362769

T3 - MobiArch 2020 - Proceedings of the 2020 ACM MobiArch 2020 the 15th Workshop on Mobility in the Evolving Internet Architecture, Part of Mobicom 2020

SP - 48

EP - 53

BT - MobiArch 2020 - Proceedings of the 2020 ACM MobiArch 2020 the 15th Workshop on Mobility in the Evolving Internet Architecture, Part of Mobicom 2020

PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc

Y2 - 21 September 2020

ER -