A Multiple-Blockchains based Service Monitoring Framework in Edge-Cloud Computing.

In the edge-cloud computing, the applications usually are delivered as services, each of which runs independently and can cooperate to construct the complicated applications. However, it is difficult to monitor the services in the decentralized edge-cloud environment since there usually does not exist the central authorization to guarantee trustiness of the service quality data collected. To address the trust issue, the blockchain techniques have been introduced to the service monitoring. Considering the services usually are distributed on the edge nodes, if we deploy only a blockchain on the edge nodes near to the services, it may have to support both the service registration and monitoring because of the loose-coupling principle. That would influence the performance, even would crash the edge nodes. In this paper, we propose a multiple-blockchains based framework, including a registration blockchain that focuses on the service registration and discovery, and a set of monitoring blockchains that focus on the service invocation and monitoring. The registration blockchain is deployed on the cloud nodes, and the monitoring blockchains are deployed on the edge nodes near to the services for collecting efficiently and precisely the service quality data. Based on the cross-chain technology, we design a cross-chain service discovery between the monitoring blockchain and the registration blockchain for finding the services the requesters need. Finally, we implement the registration and monitoring blockchains based on the blockchain platform Cosmos and conduct a set of experiments to show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.