Enabling Dynamic SLA Compensation Using Blockchain-based Smart Contracts

Service Level Agreements (SLA) are documents that specify what Service Providers (SP) are delivering to customers. They contain information about the service, such as target performance level or monthly availability, and penalties for the violations of the SLA. The information about the penalties is essential because if the SP does not deliver what is defined, the customer must be compensated accordingly. However, the current compensation process is cumbersome and complex because of the amount of involved manual effort. To address this issue, it is proposed in this paper an approach based on blockchain and Smart Contracts (SC) to automate the compensation process while enabling dynamic payments during the SLA lifetime. The proposed approach was evaluated in an use case that simulates the management of a Quality of Service SLA between an SP and a customer. Based on the performed evaluation, parts of the SLA management process were successfully automated using a decentralized solution, and the payment of the compensation occurred without the intervention of a third party.