Blockchain-Based Decentralized Reverse Bidding in Fog Computing

Abstract

Fog computing systems are designed to provide localized computation, storage, and communication services in close proximity to the endpoint mobile and IoT devices. Fog service providers typically monetize their service usage via centralized payment mechanisms in unverifiable and non-transparent manner. Therefore, there exists a need for a trust-enabling payment mechanism whereby fog service providers should be incentivized or penalized based upon the continuous feedback from endpoint devices. We propose a decentralized reverse-bidding scheme developed using the key features of blockchain and smart contracts. We develop a solution that allows the users or devices to initiate the bidding process by making a request for services to be provided by nearby public fog nodes, and these fog nodes to make bid offers in return. The proposed scheme ensures that all fog nodes on the network can equally and fairly make offers to win the bid. The bidding process incorporates the automated payments at the end of the service. Our solution is implemented using Ethereum smart contracts. It also integrates a reputation system for fog nodes and imposes a penalty for misbehaving nodes. Our solution is fully decentralized and provides a high level of trust, transparency, and security. In the paper, we present the system architecture, implementation details, and show the correct functionality of the overall proposed solution. In addition, we provide performance, cost, and security analyses of the smart contract code to demonstrate its effectiveness and robustness against major security concerns. The results show that the cost of running the smart contract remained less than three cents with the current Ethereum price (i.e., 183.22 USD/Eth). We have also made our smart contract code publicly available on Github. 1

Fair Resource Allocation Policies in Reverse Auction-Based Cloud Market

“…The limitation of this work is that a user may get a less efficient service provider during allocation (alteration in providers' wealth rank), but it is required to maintain competition in the market, to reduce bidder drop problem and to overcome cloud market stagnation. Future work is intended to be more focused on designing fair mechanisms using some different approaches such as blockchain [66], feedback based fairness [34,67], etc. A generalized architectural framework for reverse auction-based market would definitely be helpful for the researchers and the academicians to design fair mechanisms in a more complex fog/edge environment [35].…”

When Blockchain Meets Auction Models: A Survey, Some Applications, and Challenges

“…It integrates a truthful double auction and a bidding language to match highly heterogeneous edge resources with different service requests. Debe et al [124] demonstrated a blockchainbased reverse auction solution for public fog service allocation. Yu et al [125] also leveraged the reverse auction model and presented a blockchain-based edge crowdsourcing service system.…”

The Purview of Blockchain Appositeness in Computing Paradigms: A Survey

“…5) Debe et al [45] implemented a reputation-based mechanism using a blockchain to identify the reputation of a fog node either to distribute incentives or to penalize them for bad behaviour.…”