A Distributed-Ledger-based Multi-Entity Cooperation Platform for Network-Cloud Recovery

Cooperation among telecom carriers and datacenter (DC) providers (DCPs) is essential to ensure resiliency of network-cloud ecosystems. To enable efficient cooperative recovery in case of resource crunch, e.g., due to traffic congestion or network failures, we previously studied several frameworks for cooperative recovery among different stakeholders (e.g., telecom carriers and DCPs). Now, we introduce a novel Multi-entity Cooperation Platform (MCP) for implementing cooperative recovery planning, to achieve efficient use of carriers' valuable optical-network resources during recovery. We adopt a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) that ensures decentralized and tamper-proof information exchange among stakeholders to achieve open and fair cooperation. To support diverse types of cooperation, we develop a state machine representing the MCP operation and define state transitions associated to stakeholders' cooperation within the state machine. Moreover, we propose a signaling system in MCP to ensure simple and reliable state transitions for stakeholders during the cooperative recovery planning in large ecosystems. We experimentally demonstrate a proof-of-concept DLT-based MCP on a testbed. We showcase a DCP-carrier cooperative planning process, showing the flexibility of the proposed MCP to support diverse types of cooperation.