In edge computing, applications are usually delivered as services, each of which runs independently and cooperates to construct complicated applications. QoS (Quality of Service) monitoring is an important way to detect and locate faulty services. In a decentralized environment, QoS monitoring will face trust problem because it is difficult to guarantee the trustworthiness of monitoring results. This article builds a blockchain system for QoS monitoring. However, there are two challenges. First, although the blockchain consensus ensures the consistency of on-chain data among nodes, there is no guarantee that the monitoring data collected in the decentralized environment are authentic, because malicious nodes may report falsified data. Second, in order to handle service faults in time, the real-time query is usually required for obtaining monitoring data. But, blockchains suffer from inefficient querying, because the sequential data storage of blockchain is designed for write intensive applications at the expense of some read performance. To address these challenges, this article proposes a clustering-based algorithm for validating the authenticity of monitoring data collected in the decentralized environment, and proposes a probabilistic threshold query over blockchain, which supports efficient querying and guarantees the probability that the query results are correct is not less than a given threshold. This article implements the proposed blockchain system based on the blockchain platformHyperledger Fabricand the edge computing platformKubeEdge. The experiment results demonstrate the proposed blockchain system provides high-throughput and low-latency monitoring ability, and can efficiently obtain monitoring results close to real QoS data.

Blockchain technologies pave a promising way for implementing the inter-organizational processes. Most of the current research works translate the execution logic in the process models into the smart contracts, which can run independently on the blockchain without the outside process engine. However, the works usually suffer from the execution and storage costs, since the translation needs to be done when the processes are deployed. In this paper, we customize a process engine for executing the inter-organizational business processes via a blockchain-style procedure, i.e., checking the validity of transactions, adding the valid transactions into the blockchain through the consensus mechanism, and then updating the process states according to the committed transactions. And then, we build a blockchain system by embedding the customized process engine into the blockchain nodes. Moreover, in order to realize the interactions between the inter-organizational processes running on blockchain and the services outside blockchain, we propose a blockchain-based approach for service registration, binding and invocation, and design a lease-based concurrency control protocol to logically isolate transactions from each other when invoking the services simultaneously. Finally, we implement a prototype system based on a permissioned blockchain platform Hyperledger Fabric and a process engine Activiti. The experimental results show the proposed blockchain system can execute the inter-organizational processes correctly and efficiently.