Cloud computing is one of the foundation technologies of Industry 4.0. Cloud 2.0 is the upcoming cloud technology that addresses several bottlenecks of Cloud 1.0. For instance, the presence of small service providers is threatened by the dominance of a few giant service providers in today's cloud market in Cloud 1.0. Under this circumstance, the small service providers must work together to compete with the giant competitors to survive in the market. For that, small service providers require a transparent, fair, cost-effective, fault-tolerant, and easily scalable platform that can provide reliable and quality services to customers. This work introduces a blockchain-based framework to provide such a platform for cloud service providers and their customers. Here, a new consensus mechanism is proposed to maintain the system's fairness, decentralization, and consistency. A consensus-based service monitoring concept is also introduced to assess the service quality. If a service provider does not deliver the committed quality of service (QoS), a penalty is imposed on the service provider. This framework is designed so that the service providers are always bound to provide committed QoS to the customers. Finally, we performed several experiments, and the experimental results corroborate our claims regarding the proposed framework.

Edge computing provides low-latency computing services. Since Edge computing Service Providers (ESPs) are competitors, mutual distrust and distrust towards the platform may exist if a centralized resource allocation platform is used. To address trust issues, we propose a blockchain framework for resource allocation in edge computing that ensures decentralization and transparency in resource allocation. We also offer a novel consensus mechanism for the framework, Proof of Efficient Resource Allocation (PoERA), where ESPs compete to give the best solution to the resource allocation problem to become the leader and earn rewards. The framework addresses the trust issue, single-point failure, and the biased nature of the centralized platform. PoERA includes a novel self-stabilizing leader election algorithm, ensuring no forking, final consensus and consistency, which is lacking in most existing works. The work encourages the participation of both leader and non-leader ESPs by rewarding them based on the quality of their solutions. We perform CAP theorem analysis, demonstrating that Consistency (C) and Availability (A) are more important for the proposed framework than Partition tolerance (P). We conduct experiments to show that the work ensures decentralization, fair competition, and fair reward distribution to miners, eventually improving resource allocation in edge computing.

In blockchain-based systems, participants can be malicious. Therefore, this work first characterizes several properties expected in systems where the honest behaviour of involved parties plays significant role in the success. Considering these properties, a new consensus mechanism, Proof of Karma (PoK), is proposed based on karma (actions) of nodes. PoK incorporates a self-stabilizing leader election algorithm based on karma score to ensure consistency in the system. In PoK, both new and existing nodes get a fair chance to earn profit by becoming a leader and adding a valid block to the blockchain. PoK gives incentives and imposes penalties to encourage and discourage the nodes’ honest and malicious actions, respectively. PoK is analyzed with respect to the CAP theorem. The work provides security analysis to demonstrate the resistance of PoK against various blockchain specific attacks and karma specific attacks. Several experiments are also performed to assess the performance of PoK and compare it with the baseline model. The results show the feasibility, effectiveness, usability and scalability of PoK. PoK is also compared based on the characterized properties with various existing consensus mechanisms that consider malicious actions of nodes. PoK achieves consensus finality, decentralization and fairness, outperforming existing works.