Description 

As the traditional margins are declining, there is a pressing need to safeguard the leakages and blocked revenue due to disputes between interconnect partners. Along with safeguarding the revenue it is essential to reduce the operational overheads by making the overall settlement process lean. Hyperledger based Enterprise Blockchain solution for telecom seems to be a promising development for the telecom industry as it strives to solve the challenges faced by Telcos in their settlement process. It is based on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) which has attracted a lot of attention in recent time to offer a  Way to record transactional data that should become a single source of truth to establish digital trust in the partnerships.

Why Telcos are looking at blockchain as a possible solution for partner settlement? Telecom network operators across the world get into interconnect agreements which enable a seamless communication among their customers. These agreements are executed between domestic and international operators for mobile, fixed and internet services. Telecom operators collect and store detailed activity information as events. Interconnect partners share these CDRs for the purpose of verification and settlements. This process is cumbersome, inefficient, lengthy, costly, and error-prone. Missing CDRs and discrepancies in CDRs are very common problems.

Additional Information

https://www.hyperledger.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/HL_SolutionsBrief_ReduceCost_V8.pdf

https://static.sched.com/hosted_files/onseu19/b2/Blockchain%20Based%20Settlements%20-%20ONS%20Europe%202019.pdf

https://github.com/hyperledger-labs/inter-carrier-settlements

Learning Objectives

The Mentee will learn the following:

• Participating and contributing to an open source project.
• Collaborating with Telcos, Thought Leaders, Developer community, over common open source tools and technologies.
• Understanding how Inter-carrier settlements can be resolved by Blockchain, what are the other peripheral use cases which can be built on top of Inter-carrier settlement solution.
• Enabling smart contracts, building Open APIs, Microservice architecture to solve the disputes among telecom operators.

Expected Outcome

The intern will join the  Hyperledger Telecom SIG meetings, mailing list, and chat room in developing the following:

• Framework with source code, scripts and documentation elaborating a use case for Inter-Carrier Settlements among different Telecom Operators.
• Demonstrate a set of experiments realizing Inter-Carrier Settlements processes.
• Gain domain understanding, grow as an Architect with solid understanding of concepts and technology.
• Opportunities to showcase solutions at various forums, assist SIG with building a production grade solution.
• Collaboration opportunity with Telecom Product Vendors, Telcos, research groups on real world projects 

Relation to Hyperledger 

The project is hosted by Hyperledger Telecom SIG, mainly focuses on Hyperledger Fabric  to get the advantage of permissioned Blockchain while dealing with multiple parties in business applications. The project will also showcase how Hyperledger projects like Indy for identity management and others can be utilized to enable an important Telecom use case.

Education Level

This internship project does not require any specific level of education, however the skills listed below demand familiarity with Hyperledger, Blockchain, mainly provided in graduate courses.

Skills

• Familiarity with Blockchain(Hyperledger)
• Experience with Node.js, Angular
  
• Familiarity with Telecom Concepts
• Be a proactive and self-learner, comfortable with dynamic/asynchronous e-mails and exchange of ideas.

Future plans

Once the Inter-Carrier Settlements  artifacts exist, the Telecom SIG will elaborate and develop its ideas in the solid ground work of running code. In future Telecom SIG will continue development and push the code to Hyperledger Labs. Telecom SIG is committed to solve many other real challenges faced by Telcos with Hyperledger. Objective is to make the solution lean, cost efficient, agnostic which are developed in collaboration with the Industry thought leaders.

Preferred Hours and Length of Internship

Interns required full-time commencement of 40 hrs in week and total duration include 12 weeks or Part-time commencement of 20 hrs in week and total duration include 24 weeks.

Mentor(s) Names and Contact Info

Vipin Rathi, vipin68_scs@jnu.ac.in, Asst. Professor University of Delhi, Rocket Chat: viprat

Sunay Zelawat, zsunay@gmail.com, Sr. Product Director, Subex

Ahmad Sghaier Omar, a2sghaie@uwaterloo.ca, University of Waterloo

Kamlesh Nagware, kamlesh.nagware@gmail.com, VP Blockchain, Snapper Future Tech