Smart contracts for container based video conferencing services: Architecture and implementation
This work addresses monetization challenges for stakeholders in collaborative software services, but it is incremental as it applies existing blockchain technology to a specific domain.
The authors tackled the problem of monetizing container-based video conferencing services by introducing a novel architecture using smart contracts to enable resource usage optimization and revenue sharing among stakeholders, demonstrating its benefits through a Jitsi Meet-based implementation.
Today, container-based virtualization is very popular due to the lightweight nature of containers and the ability to use them flexibly in various heterogeneously composed systems. This makes it possible to collaboratively develop services by sharing various types of resources, such as infrastructures, software and digitalized content. In this work, our home made video-conferencing (VC) system is used to study resource usage optimisation in business context. An application like this, does not provide monetization possibilities to all involved stakeholders including end users, cloud providers, software engineers and similar. Blockchain related technologies, such as Smart Contracts (SC) offer a possibility to address some of these needs. We introduce a novel architecture for monetization of added-value according to preferences of the stakeholders that participate in joint software service offers. The developed architecture facilitates use case scenarios of service and resource offers according to fixed and dynamic pricing schemes, fixed usage period, prepaid quota for flexible usage, division of income, consensual decisions among collaborative service providers, and constrained based usage of resources or services. Our container-based VC service, which is based on the Jitsi Meet Open Source software is used to demonstrate the proposed architecture and the benefits of the investigated use cases.