Monetization of Services Provided by Public Fog Nodes Using Blockchain and Smart Contracts

Abstract

Public fog nodes can be deployed in public places closer to the edge where many personal and commercial devices (e.g., a sensor, an application, or a device) can connect to. These public fog nodes can provide real-time and localized services for networking, computing, storage and content delivery to the connected devices. The monetization and payment of such services is typically manual, centralized, and lacks the necessary trust. The providers of the public fog nodes typically offer fixed pricing models for their services, and the customers manually select and pay for the used services, with little or no transparency and trust in the provided service in terms of the used time, network bandwidth, and quality of service (QoS). This paper presents a novel scheme to enable blockchain-based monetization and automated payment in cryptocurrency for services provided by public fog nodes. The proposed scheme is decentralized, trustworthy, automated, and with certain guarantees for QoS, customer satisfaction, and dispute resolutions through a reputation system. The proposed solution uses the Ethereum blockchain and its native smart contract features to govern the interactions between devices and fog nodes. The proposed solution is implemented, tested and evaluated to show correct behavior and functionality. We also provide cost and security analysis and show that our solution is resilient against major security attacks. Our smart contract is made publicly available on Github 1. INDEX TERMS Blockchain, public fog nodes, fog computing, pricing models, monetization, automated payments.

Fog computing security and privacy for the Internet of Thing applications: State‐of‐the‐art

“…The powerful cryptographic primitives such as attribute‐based encryption used in the Cloud cannot be directly used in the Fog since the access policy of ciphertexts will be different after processing by the Fog nodes, hence Fog computing should guarantee that the access policy remains the same after ciphertexts are processed by the Fog nodes 67 . Moreover, deployment of the social network, enabling IoT users to make the decision of data sharing, and deployment of the blockchain technology need to be considered 3,69,72,91,118‐122 …”

“…67 Moreover, deployment of the social network, enabling IoT users to make the decision of data sharing, and deployment of the blockchain technology need to be considered. 3,69,72,91,[118][119][120][121][122] Establishing secure and private fine-grained data sharing within the heterogeneous environment is one of the motivating tasks that need to be considered in Fog computing research. 29,69 Therefore, exploring different data distribution strategies, as entities federation, and efficient encryption scheme for unified and secure integration of current protocols and standards become a necessity for achieving secure and private data distribution network.…”

A Survey on Blockchain-Fog Integration Approaches

“…Authors of [63] proposed a BC cryptocurrency-based payment system for the provided public fog services. In this approach, fog nodes provide computation and storage services for end-users, while end-users pay for the provided services, depending on the QoS and satisfaction level using Ethereum platform.…”

Blockchain-Based Decentralized Reverse Bidding in Fog Computing

“…Two efficient approximate algorithms have been developed to solve this problem (which are FRLS and MDB), both of which are efficient, truthful, and provide sub-optimal social welfare. In the prior work, a monetization model has been developed for services provided by public fog nodes and implemented on the Ethereum blockchain [32]. The solution enabled endpoint IoT and mobile devices to subscribe to public fog nodes in order to take advantage of their services.…”