부산대학교 도서관

Cloud of Things (CoT) refers to an IoT solution consuming the cloud services of a single cloud vendor. In this article, we have introduced the concept of a MultiCoT (http://www.MultiCoT.com) solution which refers to the collaborative execution of an IoT solution by multiple cloud vendors. Cloudlets and ad-hoc clouds are the extensions of centralized cloud services, closer to the user, in the form of fog and edge computing layers respectively and the Osmotic Computing (OC) serves as a glue by accomplishing the seamless compute sharing across these layers. The OC can also be integrated within a MultiCoT solution for extending it across three computational layers of cloud, fog and edge. However, this can only be achieved after establishing enough trust among all the vendors that are working in collaboration to simultaneously serve a particular MultiCoT solution. Blockchain has been already proven for establishing trust and supporting reliable interactions among independently operating entities. Hence, it can be used for establishing trust among the multiple cloud vendors serving a single MultiCoT solution. In this article, we have presented the importance of using the proactive Blockchain-enabled Osmotic Manager (B-OM) for improving the reliability of OC. We have also highlighted the blockchain features that can improve the reliability of OC by establishing trust among the independently operating vendors of a MultiCoT solution, followed by the challenges associated with the integration of blockchain and OC along with the future research directions for achieving the proposed integration.