Enabling Auditable Trust in Autonomous Networks with Ethereum and IPFS

Abstract

Operation and management of telecommunication networks are increasingly difficult with the demands and behaviors of users exceeding the capacity of network engineers to keep pace. This has led to increased automation of the network, enabled by various forms of intelligent software. One such proposal from the ITU-T Focus Group on Autonomous Networks (standardization group) is an architecture to achieve self-driven automation (i.e. autonomy) of network operation, whereby technology from different operators and third parties is self-assembled and deployed in production networks. This raises questions and challenges regarding transparency, auditability, and trust while maintaining interoperability.This work presents an initial study of a distributed and decentralized marketplace to bring transparent and auditable trust to the proposed architecture without sacrificing interoperable functionality. We demonstrated this by our proof of concept implementation of both the proposed architecture and marketplace based on the combination of Ethereum and IPFS.