Provisioning Deterministic Finite Automata for QoS Monitoring in Blockchain Decentralized Applications

Abstract

To address the critical need for enhancing Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring in the logistics service delivery domain, this paper introduces a blockchain-based QoS monitoring framework that aims to automate service delivery and dispute resolution processes. Traditional QoS monitoring solutions rely heavily on human judgment and intervention, which may increase operational costs and reduce service reliability. Such behaviour highlights the demand for more efficient and transparent logistics services, which underlines the importance of utilizing blockchain technology’s immutable and decentralized nature. The proposed framework in this paper employs a graph-based approach to transform QoS requirements into Deterministic Finite Automata (DFA) format. This strategy simplifies delivery monitoring and the identification of service violations through efficient DFA traversal. By using the Ethereum network as the deployment environment, we demonstrate that traversing a DFA is computationally efficient and reduces operational costs. Extensive experiments were conducted to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the framework, showing that monitoring a delivery using this framework costs approximately ${\$}$ 2.59. This finding underscores the framework’s advantages in operational cost optimization compared to traditional human-based methods. Moreover, the decentralized nature of our proposed framework allows customers and businesses to define and monitor QoS parameters jointly. Therefore, the business partners can establish a transparent and trust-based relationship.

Keywords

• Blockchain oracle problem
• smart contracts
• distributed ledger technology
• Ethereum
• decentralized applications