Smart Contract Design Considerations for SLA Compliance Assessment in the Context of IoT

Abstract

One of the main drivers behind blockchain adoption is a lack of trust among entities serving a common goal, but with different interests. Following the success of Bitcoin, several blockchain platforms have emerged, such as Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric, to enable conducting distrusted processes in a non-repudiable manner. However, it is not safe to assume the applicability of conventional software design strategies to Blockchain-based solutions. In this paper, we assume an untrusted SLA (service level agreement) relationship between an IoT service provider and its consumer. We adopt Hyperledger Fabric for the purpose of implementing SLA compliance assessment. We design a smart contract that takes blockchain unique features into consideration. The design particularly accounts for the MVCC (multiversion concurrency control) mechanism, which while effective for resolving the double spending problem, causes read-write conflicts when high transmission rates are experienced between the IoT application and the blockchain. Using a fire station event monitoring scenario, we describe our smart contract design and solution for conflicting transactions. We experimentally evaluate our solution and demonstrate clear performance improvements in terms of throughput and latency.