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The minimum recommendation of hardware sizing for PoC:
EEndorsing peer node
1 per Chaincode per organization
AAnchor peer node
1 per organization
OOrderer node
1 per channel
CCommitting peer node
2 per organization
The hardware sizing provided would be required for the wholesale settlement MVP, though the number of the peer nodes can differ based on the actual load and transaction rate.
The considerations made for the above-mentioned sizing are:
● One endorsing peer node per Chaincode will enable higher performance if multiple smart contracts are to be run in parallel without adversely affecting the endorsement process.
● Two committing peers per organization would facilitate distributed availability of the ledger.
● One anchor peer per organization would facilitate the connection between the organizations in the channel.
● One Orderer per channel would help in ordering the messages so that they are sent to the connected peers in the same order.
7. Blockchain Challenges
Inter-Carrier Settlements, when combined with blockchain, which brings in the philosophy of consensus, security, privacy, and trust, can address some of the key challenges of partnerships. Telecommunication companies can leverage this emerging technology to create a difference in today’s dynamic business landscape with existing and emerging partners. As the technology is in its initial stages, along with the promising capabilities, there are its own set of challenges.
Hyperledger Telecom Special Interest Group (SIG) is actively collaborating with Operators, Vendors, and Researchers to solve below challenges:
1. Business Challenges - Define use cases and integrate these with multi DLT technology to provide better results. Some of the identified use cases are around wholesale Disputes and Invoice reconciliation.
2. Performance Challenges – This is one of the biggest challenges, the current wholesale partnerships between two operators amount to millions of transactions per day. This value will only rise when we talk about the IoT and M2M scenarios with 5G becoming mainstream. Hyperledger Telecom SIG is committed to collaborating with the technical community to build a blockchain based solution that does not just bring expected performance, but also optimizes the resources to have cost-effective solutions.
3. Interoperability challenges – Another challenge of blockchain is interoperability between multi DLT platforms. Blockchain can only be effective if used by a consortium, but it does not make sense to limit each party to a common DLT platform. Hence another key aspect where Hyperledger Telecom SIG wants to collaborate is to solve interoperability challenges. There are multiple projects like Hyperledger Quilt, Polkadot, Ark Smartbridge that are working to solve this problem. We believe that the right solution combined with optimization shall solve this challenge for the parties that which to partner on different DLT platforms.
8. Next Steps (Proposal)
The next step will be to develop a PoC demonstrating Inter-Carrier Settlement use case and form an operator consortium. This whitepaper is a step forward to showcase the intention of Hyperledger Telecom SIG in solving traditional reconciliation processes, bringing automation and simplification of exchanges. The scope, details, call flows, and development roadmap are subject to discussion and consensus within the group.18
9. Conclusions
Decentralization is at the heart of Blockchain and the distributed ledger technologies (DLT) and is the underpinning enabler of disintermediation. At its core, disintermediation is the economical driver fueling the adoption of DLT across many industries, including telecommunications.
Inefficiencies of the intercarrier settlement process within the telecommunications industry are well documented and understood by practitioners. Over the years, network operators have lost billions of dollars due to disputes over billing data discrepancies and mismatches and also due to delayed revenue recognition.
In this paper, we explained the inter-carrier settlement problem in detail and proposed a solution based on the open source Hyperledger DLT. The solution simplifies the settlement process by creating a trusted, single source of truth for the call detail records generated by the participating carriers, which eliminates the root cause of data mismatches and discrepancies.
The proposed solution focused on a set of core functionality that allows carriers to reduce friction, time, and costs while maintaining autonomy, integrity, privacy, and control over their own data. The level of details discussed in the paper is sufficient for implementing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to demonstrate the core promises of the solution— simplifying and expediting the cross-charging and billing data-verification process across multiple carriers.
Our objective is to form a global consortium representing network operators, billing and settlement vendors, technologists, and industry forum to realize the proposed solution. We would like to showcase the solution at the global stage for the sake of improving and maturing it to a commercial-grade level ready for adoption by carriers worldwide.
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10. Annex A – Hyperledger Frameworks
As shown in Table 1, different Hyperledger frameworks have different purposes. You can see more about each relevant framework in the section below.
FRAMEWORK
BRIEF DESCRIPTION
SEE ALSO
HHYPERLEDGER FABRIC
Hyperledger Fabric is a blockchain framework implementation and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation. Intended as a foundation for developing applications or solutions with a modular architecture, Hyperledger Fabric allows components, such as consensus and membership services, to be plug-and-play.
Hyperledger Fabric leverages container technology to host smart contracts called “chaincode” that comprise the application logic of the system.
Hyperledger Fabric was initially contributed by Digital Asset and IBM, as a result of the first hackathon.
6.2
Table 1: Summary of Hyperledger Frameworks
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