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P. Klein:
"Contract Definition and Governance for IoT";
Supervisor: H. Truong; Institute of Information Systems Engineering, Distributed Systems Group, 2018; final examination: 2018-02-26.

In large scale deployment of the Internet of Things a high number of devices such as sports wearables, home heating and air conditioning systems, manufacturing machines and in-vehicle components are connected to each other and to cloud applications providing complex services for users. IoT units provide a software based abstraction of services, sensors and actors of devices. Contractual relationship of the Stakeholders IoT unit provider, IoT service provider and IoT service consumer have to be captured in a well-defined, machine processable and automatically enforceable manner. A challenge is the dynamic runtime environment where unit providers run IoT units for different services on the same shared platform, and services require input from several units of different providers to be able to fulfill their requirements. In this thesis an extensible framework is described that covers contract creation with a flexible model based on JSON (Java Script Object Notation), monitoring of contract term related constraints on IoT units via Aspect-oriented programming as well as contract enforcement by storing and retrieval of contract violations and linking them as hash values to smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. A prototype is implemented and evaluated with respect to solving use cases based on real world scenarios and with respect to handle workloads defined in performance testing. The results gained from evaluation demonstrate that the introduced framework for IoT contract definition and governance is able to cover real world scenarios and provides performance and scalability to handle the workloads related to the scenarios.