Fine-grained QoS provisioning with micropayments in wireless networks

In the era of 5G and beyond, advanced network technologies will be adopted along with providing high, diverse Quality of Service (QoS) levels of network services. In such a context, it is necessary to have a more flexible and responsive network provisioning system than the existing ones in 4G. This paper addresses the issue of fine-grained QoS provisioning with payment, which benefits the users and providers. As a solution, we propose Software Defined Networking (SDN)-based QoS provisioning with IOTA micropayments (SQI), which allocates the guaranteed QoS service on a per-network flow or per-user basis after confirmed payment. Different from the previous works, SQI can provide both bandwidths and delay guaranteed services, which leverage the SDN technology. Additionally, SQI can support concurrently multiple network flows, e.g., from different clients. Besides, SQI adopts the (public) IOTA Tangle 1.5, which is more lightweight and faster than the previous IOTA versions. Moreover, SQI includes a private IOTA Tangle that can be tunable to speed up the transaction process. We have implemented SQI using Mininet-WiFi, the POX SDN controller, and IOTA 1.5 and evaluated SQI in various scenarios. The evaluation results show that SQI can provide expected delay and bandwidth (with micropayments) to one and multiple flows. We have also compared the processing request duration of the public IOTA and private ones to reveal the appealing feature of private IOTA.