Abstract
Public fog nodes can be deployed in public places closer to the edge where many personal and commercial devices (e.g., a sensor, an application, or a device) can connect to. These public fog nodes can provide real-time and localized services for networking, computing, storage and content delivery to the connected devices. The monetization and payment of such services is typically manual, centralized, and lacks the necessary trust. The providers of the public fog nodes typically offer fixed pricing models for their services, and the customers manually select and pay for the used services, with little or no transparency and trust in the provided service in terms of the used time, network bandwidth, and quality of service (QoS). This paper presents a novel scheme to enable blockchain-based monetization and automated payment in cryptocurrency for services provided by public fog nodes. The proposed scheme is decentralized, trustworthy, automated, and with certain guarantees for QoS, customer satisfaction, and dispute resolutions through a reputation system. The proposed solution uses the Ethereum blockchain and its native smart contract features to govern the interactions between devices and fog nodes. The proposed solution is implemented, tested and evaluated to show correct behavior and functionality. We also provide cost and security analysis and show that our solution is resilient against major security attacks. Our smart contract is made publicly available on Github 1 . 1 https://github.com/mazendb/fognodemonetization
Highlights
Fog computing extends the cloud computing services from core network infrastructures to customer-premises using a variety of fog nodes namely smart switches, micro data centers, cloud-lets, and proximal mobile edge servers, to name a few
We propose a design for such a scheme using the Ethereum blockchain along with the interactions between public fog nodes and their connected devices
Developers can program their own smart contracts to run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which is the run-time environment for Ethereum
Summary
Fog computing extends the cloud computing services from core network infrastructures to customer-premises using a variety of fog nodes namely smart switches, micro data centers, cloud-lets, and proximal mobile edge servers, to name a few. One obvious solution is to utilize a third-party registration and payment system to manage the registration of all stakeholders (i.e. devices, cloud-service broker, system integrators, and cloud vendors), to customize the service level agreements, to outline the QoS metrics, to tailor pricing models, and to enable secure and trustworthy payment system. Deploying such a centralized solution, as depicted, defies the purpose of fog computing as it adds an overhead to the communication between all the stakeholders.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
