A Blockchain-Based Framework to Resolve the Oligopoly Issue in Cloud Computing

Abstract

Cloud computing is one of the foundation technologies of Industry 4.0. Cloud 2.0 is the upcoming cloud technology that addresses several bottlenecks of Cloud 1.0. For instance, the presence of small service providers is threatened by the dominance of a few giant service providers in today's cloud market in Cloud 1.0. Under this circumstance, the small service providers must work together to compete with the giant competitors to survive in the market. For that, small service providers require a transparent, fair, cost-effective, fault-tolerant, and easily scalable platform that can provide reliable and quality services to customers. This work introduces a blockchain-based framework to provide such a platform for cloud service providers and their customers. Here, a new consensus mechanism is proposed to maintain the system's fairness, decentralization, and consistency. A consensus-based service monitoring concept is also introduced to assess the service quality. If a service provider does not deliver the committed quality of service (QoS), a penalty is imposed on the service provider. This framework is designed so that the service providers are always bound to provide committed QoS to the customers. Finally, we performed several experiments, and the experimental results corroborate our claims regarding the proposed framework. © 2013 IEEE.