Managing QoS of Internet-of-Things Services Using Blockchain

Abstract

Owing to the exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoTs), ensure that the Quality of Service (QoS) over IoT becomes challenges at the network edge or on cloud. The traditional mechanisms for QoS measurements rely on the centralized trusted third parties who use specialized agents to collect data and measure the performances of services. However, these mechanisms are ineffective to deal with highly dynamic and distributed nature of IoT-based services. Moreover, the dynamism of QoS needs to collect, update, and access reliable quality relevant data frequently, while lacking trust becomes a major hurdle for data utilization. It is our argument that the QoS measurement of IoT-based services would be decentralized and the trusts be built from collectively trusted subnetworks. In this paper, we propose to integrate the blockchain technologies (BCT) with a multi-agent approach to warrantee the trustiness of real-time data for the measurement of QoS in the IoT environment. The proposed approach is verified by some demonstrative examples in addressing QoS specification patterns commonly found in service-based applications (SBAs), where qualitative analyses are conducted for the evaluation of the patterns.