Blockchain-based SLA Management for Inter-Provider Agreements

Abstract

With features like immutability and transparency, blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) can enable the telco industry to exchange services using smart contracts. Consequently, various 6G network stakeholders can participate in a marketplace for inter-provider agreements as either service providers or consumers. As, a blockchain-based 6G network can aid administrative domains in sharing resources (virtual network functions, services, or slices). However, such a dynamic environment requires strict Service Level Agreement (SLA) monitoring and management. Therefore, this paper considers a use case of a smart contract-based inter-provider agreement. We use novel solutions like IOTA Tangle to perform transactions, IPFS to store the hash of use case data files, and chainlink to access off-chain data feeds for SLA monitoring, reducing costs and increasing transparency. We also provide experimental evaluations of and divide the emulation into two phases. Phase 1 consists of choosing the approach and creating a smart contract (SC) (i.e., SC-Marketplace or SC-Auction). Furthermore, phase 2 consists of off-chain data feed to monitor SLA through chainlink. Finally, we measure transaction latency, response time, overall time consumption, and transaction & storage cost. The maximum latency observed in phase 1 is$\approx 25\text{ms}$and$\approx 15\mathrm{s}$for phase 2. Similarly, the average response time for both phases is$\approx 14\mathrm{s}$~ 20s. Lastly, the results also explain that using IOTA-EVM, we can have fee-less transactions, and IPFS helps reduce the storage cost by up to$\approx 80\%$. However, it is concluded that adding chainlink adds additional cost for SLA data feeds.