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Smart Contracts for Service-Level Agreements in Edge-to-Cloud Computing

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Abstract

The management of Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) in Edge-to-Cloud computing is a complex task due to the great heterogeneity of computing infrastructures and networks and their varying runtime conditions, which influences the resulting Quality of Service (QoS). SLA-management should be supported by formal assurances, ranking and verification of various microservice deployment options. This work introduces a novel Smart Contract (SC) based architecture that provides for SLA management among relevant entities and actors in a decentralised computing environment: Virtual Machines (VMs), Cloud service consumers and Cloud providers. Its key components are especially designed SC functions, a trustless Smart Oracle (Chainlink) and a probabilistic Markov Decision Process. The novel architecture is implemented on Ethereum ledger (testnet). The results show its feasibility for SLA management including low costs operation within dynamic and decentralised Edge-to-Cloud federations.

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Acknowledgements

The research and development reported in this paper have received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement no. 815141 (DECENTER: Decentralised technologies for orchestrated Cloud-to-Edge intelligence) and grant agreement no. 957338 (ONTOCHAIN: Trusted, traceable and transparent ontological knowledge on blockchain).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Petar Kochovski, Vlado Stankovski & Sandi Gec

  2. University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy

    Marco Savi

  3. Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy

    Francescomaria Faticanti, Marco Savi & Domenico Siracusa

  4. University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Francescomaria Faticanti

  5. Korea Electronics Technology Institute, Seongnam-si, Republic of Korea

    Seungwoo Kum

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  1. Petar Kochovski
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  2. Vlado Stankovski
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  3. Sandi Gec
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  4. Francescomaria Faticanti
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  5. Marco Savi
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  7. Seungwoo Kum
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Correspondence to Vlado Stankovski.

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Kochovski, P., Stankovski, V., Gec, S. et al. Smart Contracts for Service-Level Agreements in Edge-to-Cloud Computing. J Grid Computing 18, 673–690 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-020-09534-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-020-09534-y

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