For the viability of future “mission-critical” applications such as remote surgery and connected cars, the customers must trust the network connection and operators must adhere to the Service Level Agreement (SLA). The key to enabling trust between the customer and the operator is the transparency and accountability of the SLA. That is, the operators ensure the transparent and appropriate execution of SLA clauses (e.g., Quality of Service (QoS) and compensations if the SLA is violated). In this work, we argue that today’s network is highly volatile. Therefore, it is convenient for the operators to provide service guarantees for short-term rather than traditional long-term methods. Consequently, we advocate short-term and dynamic service contracts considering spatial and temporal characteristics rather than typical long-term contracts. We propose a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)-focused end-to-end transparent, accountable and automated resource provisioning system architecture in which are installed as smart contracts. In our architecture, resources can be requested and allocated dynamically and automatically with Quality-of-Service (QoS) monitoring. Our architecture is scalable through a side-channel based QoS monitoring protocol that guarantees data integrity and minimises the Permissioned Distributed Ledgers (PDL) updates. To measure the viability of our proposal, we first evaluate resource provisioning in the context of network slicing. Then we assess the DLT performance for smart contract execution, in both permissioned and permission-less settings. In the end, we evaluate the monitoring tools and compare and contrast sketches and bloomfilters, and justify our choice of bloomfilters.

The viability of new mission-critical networked applications such as connected cars or remote surgery is heavily dependent on the availability of truly customized network services at a Quality of Service (QoS) level that both the network operator and the customer can agree on. This is difficult to achieve in today’s mainly "best effort" Internet. Even if a level of service were to be agreed upon between a consumer and an operator, it is important for both parties to be able to scalably and impartially monitor the quality of service delivered in order to enforce the service level agreement (SLA). Building upon a recently proposed architecture for automated negotiation of SLAs using smart contracts, we develop a low overhead solution for monitoring these SLAs and arranging automated payments based on the smart contracts. Our solution uses cryptographically secure bloom filters to create succinct summaries of the data exchanged over fine-grained epochs. We then use a state channel-based design for both parties to quickly and scalably agree and sign off on the data that was delivered in each epoch, making it possible to monitor and enforce at run time the agreed upon QoS levels.

The use of blockchains is growing every day, and their utility has greatly expanded from sending and receiving crypto-coins to smart-contracts and decentralized autonomous organizations. Modern blockchains underpin a variety of applications: from designing a global identity to improving satellite connectivity. In our research we look at the ability of blockchains to store metadata in an increasing volume of transactions and with evolving focus of utilization. We further show that basic approaches to improving blockchain privacy also rely on embedding metadata. This paper identifies and classifies real-life blockchain transactions embedding metadata of a number of major protocols running essentially over the bitcoin blockchain. The empirical analysis here presents the evolution of metadata utilization in the recent years, and the discussion suggests steps towards preventing criminal use. Metadata are relevant to any blockchain, and our analysis considers primarily bitcoin as a case study. The paper concludes that simultaneously with both expanding legitimate utilization of embedded metadata and expanding blockchain functionality, the applied research on improving anonymity and security must also attempt to protect against blockchain abuse.