SLA-Based Sharing Economy Service with Smart Contract for Resource Integrity in the Internet of Things

Recently, technology startups have leveraged the potential of blockchain-based technologies to govern institutions or interpersonal trust by enforcing signed treaties among different individuals in a decentralized environment. However, it is going to be hard enough convincing that the blockchain technology could completely replace the trust among trading partners in the sharing economy as sharing services always operate in a highly dynamic environment. With the rapid expanding of the rental market, the sharing economy faces more and more severe challenges in the form of regulatory uncertainty and concerns about abuses. This paper proposes an enhanced decentralized sharing economy service using the service level agreement (SLA), which documents the services the provider will furnish and defines the service standards the provider is obligated to meet. The SLA specifications are defined as the smart contract, which facilitates multi-user collaboration and automates the process with no involvement of the third party. To demonstrate the usability of the proposed solution in the sharing economy, a notebook sharing case study is implemented using the Hyperledger Fabric. The functionalities of the smart contract are tested using the Hyperledger Composer. Moreover, the efficiency of the designed approach is demonstrated through a series of experimental tests using different performance metrics.