BRIEF DERSCRIPTION OF BLOCKCLOUD
Blockcloud is a Blockchain-based Service-centric Network Stack.
With a predicted 20 billion devices by 2022, the Internet of Things is increasingly a platform for accessing services that run anywhere. Applications such as smart healthcare, virtual augmented reality, vehicle telematics, self-navigating cars/drones and multi-user ultra-high definition telepresence are envisioned to be common in the near future. Unfortunately, the dream of a smart, safe and efficient future is being threatened. Inherited from the internet design, today’s IoT architecture is facing great challenges by frail connectivity, poor scalability, absent trust, cracked security and broken business model.
A number of researchers propose a Service-centric Networking (SCN) to address the above problems. SCN is a future internet technology that provides a service-aware network stack, where applications communicate directly on service names instead of addresses. In this way, SCN provides a clean-slate solution for interface failover, device mobility, and global scalability.
Many studies use a blockchain to provide IoT with trust, secure and economically incentive properties. The blockchain is the first technology that provides everyone with a working proof of a decentralised trust. It also provides a frictionless Internet-native currency that allows for the first time to empower a sensor to provide services to the network.
Blockcloud is presented as a new approach that combines the advantages of SCN and blockchain to empower IoT. In Blockcloud, SCN forms the underlying physical network that provides connectivity, mobility and scalability
The Blockcloud team proposes to improve IoT by the service-centric paradigm. This simple change to the hourglass model, allowing the thin waist to use service names instead of IP addresses for service achievement, makes service rather than its containers a first-class citizen in the IoT architecture. The service names in Blockcloud can be used to name a chunk of data in a conversation, as the TCP/IP transport signature plus sequence number does today, but they can also name s streaming service from Youtube directly, rather than forcing it to be embedded in a conversation between the consuming host and youtube.com.
In Blockcloud, the distributed nature of services with peer-to-peer technology makes scalability possible. Service registration and discovery become the key features of Blockcloud, which can be easily achieved from the adoption of a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) network.
THE BLOCKCLOUD ARCHITECTURE
Blockcloud introduces new functionality on top of blockchains by defining a set of new operations that are otherwise not supported by the blockchain. By carefully learning the lessons from the design philosophy of the TCP/IP network and exploring the successful experience of superior blockchain research result, the Blockcloud team decide to build a layered structure.
Blockcloud has four layers, with two layers (transactional layer and servicechain layer) in the control plane and two layers (routing layer and service layer)in the service plane.
1. Transactionchain Layer:
The transactionchain occupies the lowest tier. Blockcloud operations are encoded in transactions on the underlying transactionchain. The transactionchain stores the transactions of the network as a global ledger and while Blockcloud holds an evolving concepts that provides the feasibility and compatibility of different underling blockchain technologies, due to the characteristic of IoT, the chosen technology for the transactionchain layer must be elastic, efficient, secure, scalable and cost-effective.
2. Servicechain Layer:
Above layer 1 is a servicechain, which defines new operations without requiring changes to the underlying blockchain. Only Blockcloud nodes are aware of this layer and underlying blockchain nodes are agnostic to it. Blockcloud operations are defined in the servicechain layer and are encoded in valid blockchain transactions as additional metadata. Blockchain nodes do see the raw transactions, but the logic to process Blockcloud operations only exists at the servicechain level. The rules for accepting or rejecting Blockcloud operations are also defined in the servicechain.
3. Routing Layer:
Blockchain seperates the task of routing requests (i.e how to discover service) from the actual providing of service. This avoids the need for the system to adopt any particular management service from the onset, and instead allows multiple service providers to coexist, including both commercial entity and peer-to-peer systems.
Blockcloud uses service files for storing routing information, which are similar to DNS zone files in their format. The servicechain binds names to respective hash (service file) and stores thes bindings in the control plane, whereas the service files themselves are stored in the routing layer. Users do not need to trust the routing layer because the intergrity of service files can be verified by checking the hash (zone file) in the control plane.
4. Service Layer:
The top-most layer is the service layer, which serves the actual services for the network. All service names are signed by the key of the respective owner of a service. By providing services outside of the transactionchain, Blockcloud allows arbitrary IoT services that is provided by a variety of IoT devices. Users do not need to trust the service provider because they can verify the authenticity of the service by proof-of-service in the control plane.
www.block-cloud.
