JITRA: Just-In-Time Resource Allocation Through the Distributed Ledgers for 5G and Beyond

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.