Smart contracts for container based video conferencing services:\n Architecture and implementation

Abstract

Today, container-based virtualization is very popular due to the lightweight\nnature of containers and the ability to use them flexibly in various\nheterogeneously composed systems. This makes it possible to collaboratively\ndevelop services by sharing various types of resources, such as\ninfrastructures, software and digitalized content. In this work, our home made\nvideo-conferencing (VC) system is used to study resource usage optimisation in\nbusiness context. An application like this, does not provide monetization\npossibilities to all involved stakeholders including end users, cloud\nproviders, software engineers and similar. Blockchain related technologies,\nsuch as Smart Contracts (SC) offer a possibility to address some of these\nneeds. We introduce a novel architecture for monetization of added-value\naccording to preferences of the stakeholders that participate in joint software\nservice offers. The developed architecture facilitates use case scenarios of\nservice and resource offers according to fixed and dynamic pricing schemes,\nfixed usage period, prepaid quota for flexible usage, division of income,\nconsensual decisions among collaborative service providers, and constrained\nbased usage of resources or services. Our container-based VC service, which is\nbased on the Jitsi Meet Open Source software is used to demonstrate the\nproposed architecture and the benefits of the investigated use cases.\n