Blockchain-Powered Bandwidth Trading on SDN-Enabled Edge Network

Abstract

Bandwidth trading procedures can be made to incentivize users to sell their needless traffic and indirectly reduce the probability of traffic congestion. However, implementation of bandwidth trading is opex-heavy from Internet Service Provider (ISP) perspective, while on the other hand, users also do not trust network executions from the ISP due to its heavily centralized control. These issues hinder the applicability of bandwidth trading and become our motivation to propose this paper. Our bandwidth-trading framework utilize software-defined networking (SDN) and blockchain. SDN automates the bandwidth trading executions from the ISP side and reduces the opex. Meanwhile, the smart contract is a trusted platform for building a trading marketplace where buyers, sellers, and SDN controllers can negotiate the trading terms. Once the trading is executed, SDN controllers generate proof of trading that must be submitted to the smart contract as proof of provisioning. We implement our works using Ethereum and POX SDN controllers, and the results prove that it can provide a seamless bandwidth trading experience with reasonable overhead. Furthermore, by committing to our framework, bandwidth trading can be executed fairly and securely because all previous provisioning can be cross-checked through the provided proof-of-trading.