Leveraging Public-Private Blockchain Interoperability for Closed Consortium Interfacing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a decentralized gateway architecture that enables private blockchains to interoperate with public blockchains, enhancing security and scalability for consortium-based applications like cloud federations.

Contribution

It proposes a novel interoperation framework connecting private and public blockchains, demonstrated through a practical implementation with Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric.

Findings

Operates within acceptable latency for up to 64 requests/sec

Scales effectively with minimal latency impact as providers increase

Validated through Mininet emulation and real-world testbed

Abstract

With the increasing adoption of private blockchain platforms, consortia operating in various sectors such as trade, finance, logistics, etc., are becoming common. Despite having the benefits of a completely decentralized architecture which supports transparency and distributed control, existing private blockchains limit the data, assets, and processes within its closed boundary, which restricts secure and verifiable service provisioning to the end-consumers. Thus, platforms such as e-commerce with multiple sellers or cloud federation with a collection of cloud service providers cannot be decentralized with the existing blockchain platforms. This paper proposes a decentralized gateway architecture interfacing private blockchain with end-users by leveraging the unique combination of public and private blockchain platforms through interoperation. Through the use case of decentralized cloud federations, we have demonstrated the viability of the solution. Our testbed implementation with Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric, with three service providers, shows that such consortium can operate within an acceptable response latency while scaling up to 64 parallel requests per second for cloud infrastructure provisioning. Further analysis over the Mininet emulation platform indicates that the platform can scale well with minimal impact over the latency as the number of participating service providers increases.