A Quality of Service Compliance System Empowered by Smart Contracts and Oracles

Abstract

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are used in contracts between two parts, which can be, as an example, between service providers or between customers and service providers. SLA clauses represent key aspects in the relationship between them. In order to enforce service reliability and SLA compliance, a continuous monitoring of Quality of Service metrics is required. Since policy breach is usually subject to expensive penalties, using external entities acting as trustful references is a common practice in order to avoid frequent legal disputes, external entities are usually required to verify it. However, coordination between different actors to agree in one transaction is difficult, because it can open up possibilities for multiple fraud attempts. We argue that this can be done more efficiently using Smart Contracts, programs that are executed in a blockchain. Such data is stored in a distributed structure without the need of an external entity to ensure data integrity and reliability. Smart contracts can also makes easy the charging or possibly compensating SLA violations. In this paper we propose a solution empowered by smart contracts in order to simplify, and to automate the process of SLA validation, i.e, verify if the contract is being respected. We perform some experiments and evaluate a proof of concept using data from a real network infrastructure in Brazil.