A Blockchain-Based Decentralized Composition Solution for IoT Services

Diversified Internet of Things services are becoming more complex and strictly user-defined. Traditional cloud solutions proved to be both costly in terms of resources and time efficiency. To overcome such a burden, researchers developed fog solutions for faster service responsiveness. Fog-to-Fog communication and cooperation was then introduced to compose services on-the-go for user-specific requests with the aid of mobile edge devices. This paper introduces a blockchain-based decentralized service composition solution for complex multimedia service delivery to cloud subscribers. The proposed work dynamically creates user-defined services without requiring any intermediary service or network provider entities to authenticate and deliver composite services. The composition process uses a reinforcement learning technique to construct secure and reliable composition paths. Participants are rewarded by cloud and fog entities for solving complex composition processes. Simulation results conducted on the system show that by adapting the proposed technique, fog and cloud entities require less resources and reduced power usage with increased service delivery success rates to cloud subscribers.