Smart Contract SLAs for Dense Small-Cell-as-a-Service

TL;DR

This paper explores using blockchain-based smart contracts to establish effective SLAs in dense small-cell networks, enabling individual users to become service providers and enhancing infrastructure sharing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach of implementing SLAs via smart contracts on Ethereum to facilitate scalable and flexible small-cell sharing in telecom networks.

Findings

Smart contracts can automate SLA enforcement.

Blockchain enables scalable small-cell sharing.

Prototype contract template demonstrated on Ethereum.

Abstract

The disruptive power of blockchain technologies represents a great opportunity to re-imagine standard practices of telecommunication networks and to identify critical areas that can benefit from brand new approaches. As a starting point for this debate, we look at the current limits of infrastructure sharing, and specifically at the Small-Cell-as-a-Service trend, asking ourselves how we could push it to its natural extreme: a scenario in which any individual home or business user can become a service provider for mobile network operators, freed from all the scalability and legal constraints that are inherent to the current modus operandi. We propose the adoption of smart contracts to implement simple but effective Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between small cell providers and mobile operators, and present an example contract template based on the Ethereum blockchain.