T-DSES: A Blockchain-powered Trusted Decentralized Service Eco-System

Existing Web service eco-systems are typically managed in a centralized manner, which hinders their further development due to inherent disadvantages such as trust issues, interest disputes, value separation and so on. The recently emerged blockchains provide distributed ledgers that enable parties who do not fully trust each other to maintain a set of global states, which provide a natural solution. Based on the INKchain, which is an open-source permissioned blockchain mechanism extending the Hyperledger Fabric, this paper proposes Trusted Decentralized Service Eco System (T-DSES). T-DSES achieves not only fundamental functionalities of conventional systems, but also offers mechanisms to stimulate participants to bring trustworthiness to the whole system. The trustworthiness of T-DSES is realized by three strategies: reliable information of services and mashups, reliable records of participants' rights, and reliable measurement of participants' contributions. A customized token “SToken” is created to act as the media of value circulation. In this paper, the overall framework and detailed design of T-DSES are presented, especially including how to utilize Kubernetes to establish a cloud-based environment. A tailored Web front-end ensures the usability of operations. Over real-world data from ProgrammableWeb.com, analyses and experiments have been conducted to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the presented approach.