Guide:
"Recently, China Mobile and China Unicom have made a major breakthrough in the construction of cross-operator blockchain public infrastructure. The "settlement chain" jointly built by the two parties was officially put into commercial use. , Ningxia, Henan, and Hebei 5 provinces of operators' inter-network business settlement and outbound accounts. The results of the first operation of the settlement chain show that the business time is reduced by an average of 60%, and it is estimated that the annual labor cost savings can reach more than 10 million yuan."
Excerpt from: "Communications World Network" (CWW) - China Mobile and China Unicom jointly build the first large-scale blockchain settlement network in the communications industry
01
Business Features and Difficulties of Inter-Network Settlement
Inter-network settlement is the fee settlement for the communication behavior between operators and users, including voice, SMS, and MMS service settlement. By collecting the bills on their respective intercommunication network elements, the operators conduct settlement and approval according to the settlement rules stipulated by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and issue a reconciliation exchange form. After the three-party exchange and reconciliation table is confirmed to be correct, a formal settlement statement is issued for financial settlement. If there is a discrepancy, the three parties need to agree to extract the detailed data for comparison, check the problem, and then re-export the reconciliation exchange table for comparison and confirmation, and then output the official settlement statement for financial settlement.
To implement the above inter-network settlement and reconciliation process in a conventional system, the data needs to be stored in the database, but no matter which operator's database the data is stored in, there is a risk of data tampering. Therefore, a set of trustworthy and non-tamperable technology is needed to help the three parties complete the inter-network settlement and reconciliation business, which happens to be the specialty of blockchain technology.
02
Blockchain Science Popularization
What is blockchain?
A blockchain is a chain of blocks one after another. Certain information is stored in each block, and they are connected into a chain according to the time sequence of their generation. This chain is saved in all servers, as long as one server in the whole system can work, the whole blockchain is safe. These servers are called nodes in the blockchain system, and they provide storage space and computing power support for the entire blockchain system. If you want to modify the information in the blockchain, you must obtain the consent of more than half of the nodes and modify the information in all nodes, and these nodes are usually in the hands of different subjects, so it is extremely difficult to tamper with the information in the blockchain thing. Compared with the traditional model, the information recorded in the blockchain is more authentic and reliable, which can help solve the problem of people's mutual mistrust.
Block chain architecture design diagram
Analysis 1:
Therefore, the inter-network settlement business of the three parties of the operator is suitable for optimization and improvement using blockchain technology. The characteristics of blockchain technology can help all parties to complete the inter-network business settlement more efficiently and safely. The bottleneck of the traditional support model Breakthroughs have been made and better business results have been formed.
Blockchain technology can be divided into: public chain, private chain and alliance chain.
The public chain is a fully open blockchain, and everyone can be a node in the network without anyone giving permission or authorization. Private chain means that all write permissions on the entire blockchain are only in the hands of one organization, while read permissions can be opened to the outside world or restricted arbitrarily according to the situation.
Consortium chain is a multi-centralized or partially decentralized blockchain. The data on the ledger of the alliance chain is different from the complete disclosure of the public chain. Only alliance member nodes can access it, and operations such as read and write permissions on the chain, participation in accounting rules, etc. also need to be jointly determined by the alliance member nodes. Generally speaking, the transaction performance of the consortium chain is faster than that of the public chain, but slower than that of the private chain.
Comparison of Several Blockchain Technologies
Analysis 2:
Through comparison, it is found that alliance chain technology is most suitable for solving the problem of inter-network settlement and reconciliation between operators. Different from the public chain's full disclosure feature and the private chain's single-organization control feature, the alliance chain technology can enable operators to participate in the management of the blockchain. While ensuring data privacy and security, it is a technology with low transaction costs and fast transaction speed. Features can reduce input costs and ensure business performance requirements.
03
Internet settlement + blockchain
The Internet settlement business process is mainly composed of four key points, which are exchange report submission, exchange report reconciliation, reconciliation data review, and financial reimbursement data generation. A large amount of business data is involved in each link of the business process.
Internet settlement business process
A smart contract is a digital version of a traditional contract, which is automatically executed on the blockchain network for nodes that meet the conditions. It has the characteristics of open and transparent content, non-tamperable content, and permanent operation. According to the technical characteristics of the alliance chain, smart contracts can be used to realize the core business functions of the four links, and block storage technology is used to save the key process data of each link:
Network settlement alliance chain solution
- Exchange report submission: The three parties of the operator submit the exchange report, and the smart contract uploads the encrypted data to the blockchain.
- Exchange report reconciliation: After submitting a successful exchange report, the smart contract will be triggered to perform reconciliation based on keywords such as account period (month), province, business, etc., and the reconciliation result data will be encrypted and uploaded to the blockchain.
- Reconciliation data review: Data with differences in reconciliation needs to be manually confirmed offline for reconciliation, and data with no differences in reconciliation will be automatically generated and uploaded to the blockchain after approval.
- Financial reimbursement data generation: The smart contract obtains the confirmation data, generates the final payment reimbursement report data and uploads it to the chain.
04
Application practical points
The blockchain R&D process is similar to the traditional R&D process, but it is slightly different. The following is an introduction from the four stages of demand analysis, solution design, function R&D, and joint debugging and testing:
demand analysis
Blockchain requirements analysis is similar to the traditional requirements analysis method. It is necessary to find relevant stakeholders to investigate the business logic, and to agree on function points to output requirements analysis instructions. The difference in blockchain requirements analysis is that business actions and business data need to be mined in the business process. Most of these business actions will be designed and implemented according to the functions of smart contracts in the design phase, while business data will be implemented in the model of the design phase. In the design work, it is designed to conform to the data structure of the block data for subsequent storage in the blockchain.
Business process identification business action, business data method diagram
As shown in the figure above, identifying business actions and business data from the business process is mainly completed through two steps: first, identify which are business data and which are business actions according to the process; secondly, the business data fills in the corresponding business attributes according to the business content, Business actions are defined structurally in the form of function entry and exit parameters and function logic.
Design
The main work of the blockchain design plan is to define the block data structure that needs to be uploaded to the chain, as well as the entry and exit logic definition of the smart contract, and integrate these two parts into a design document that can guide the development and testing work.
When designing the blockchain block data structure, it is first necessary to identify whether the data is suitable for uploading to the chain, in what form, and then design its block data structure. For example, it is not recommended to upload large files (if it must be uploaded to the chain, you can choose the hash chain method) and a large amount of redundant data. The data that can be uploaded to the chain includes valuable data (such as points, notes), and there is a need for sharing The data (credit data of the enterprise) and the data that need to be processed collaboratively (such as the results of inter-network reconciliation of operators). The chaining method is selected according to different data scenarios, including hash chaining (calculate the hash value of the original data and upload it, which is suitable for large file scenarios), and data formatting chaining (data is formatted in json or xml format) Chaining after encryption, suitable for business object scenarios), and uploading to the chain after encryption (using symmetric encryption, only nodes holding the private key can decrypt, suitable for sensitive data scenarios).
The content of smart contract design includes input parameters, output parameters and smart contract logic. Different from the traditional function design, the smart contract logic should not be too complex, because the smart contract contains all the information about the transaction, as long as the conditions are met, all nodes can execute it, too complex will affect the overall performance.
function development
The research and development of the blockchain mainly includes the research and development of the chain data business logic and the research and development of the smart contract. Different blockchain platforms have different development languages, which require targeted technical reserves. For example, the C++ language is mostly used on the Bitcoin (BTC) and Litecoin (LTC) platforms, and the Go language is mostly used on the Ethereum ETH (for the alliance chain or private chain), hyperbook fabric (for consortium chain or private chain) platform. In addition, it is suggested that a separate R&D team be responsible for the blockchain R&D work, so as to avoid the unified management of subsequent codes and make it clear that each smart contract interface person can improve the joint debugging efficiency in the future.
Joint debugging test
The joint debugging test mainly includes the function point verification of smart contracts, node transaction synchronization, etc. The following examples illustrate:
When testing smart contracts, first verify whether the contract structures such as various variable types, grammatical expressions, and control interfaces can run smoothly on the blockchain platform; then verify whether the contract can be frozen or destroyed in certain security scenarios to make it Can no longer be called to execute.
Node transaction synchronization, verify whether the transaction sent by the client to a certain node can be synchronized to other nodes normally. When there is no transaction, it is also necessary to verify whether the node status is normally synchronized to other nodes.
05
epilogue
Since the blockchain has risen to become an important part of the national strategic deployment in 2019, blockchain technology and its industry have achieved rapid development. As one of the new infrastructures, blockchain technology has become an important infrastructure in the process of my country's digital government construction and digital economy development.
Based on smart contracts, the "Alliance Chain" encrypts settlement data, settlement public references and settlement rules on the chain, and provides services such as settlement information security sharing, bill data encryption exchange, automatic reconciliation, data confirmation and settlement for all parties involved in the settlement. The transaction process is traced and traceable in real time, which ensures the transparency of the settlement process and improves the security and credibility of the settlement.