Rationale and Practical Assessment of a Fully Distributed Blockchain-based Marketplace of Fog/Edge Computing Resources

On modern electronic marketplaces, the buyers and sellers (i.e., the users) trade products over software platforms provided by trusted third-party entities. In exchange for better user experience, the users allow these intermediaries to set their own arbitrary rules, which may influence reciprocal interactions and also favor some products over others. Recently, researchers have shown an increased interest in blockchain technology as a possible solution for creating decentralized marketplaces, thus avoiding the need for intermediaries. However, due to the young age of this technology, the majority of architectures proposed in the literature still rely on other types of centralized services, mainly to guarantee better user experiences. Although these schemes offer several benefits over traditional centralized architectures, they introduce other issues, such as single points of failure for the whole system. This paper presents a software architecture and the implementation of a fully decentralized marketplace solely relying on a public blockchain network. To test its effectiveness, we implemented a full-fledged marketplace of Fog/Edge computing resources, evaluating several design decisions and trade-offs in terms of monetary cost versus performance. Our experiments show that the current capabilities of blockchain technology may support such fully decentralized marketplaces, providing seamless user experiences.