Blockchain-Empowered Framework for Decentralized Network Management in 6G

Mobile network evolution beyond 5G requires a complete rethink of spectrum management. To fulfill unprecedented performance expectations, future 6G networks require fine-grained spectrum sharing in terms of volume, time, and usage area. In this article, we study a novel direction for blockchain integration into the mobile network infrastructure. In particular, we discuss the potential benefits and challenges of the proposed architecture in terms of spectrum and infrastructure sharing. The key implementation aspects of blockchain for 6G, such as a tokenization model for spectrum and infrastructure, the distributed ledger structure, and feasible consensus algorithms, are studied in detail. Finally, we implement three types of smart contracts for service provisioning with semi-persistent, dynamic, and intelligent spectrum trading and analyze the number of transactions for each type. The simulation results show that the average throughput in the case of intelligent spectrum trading is 7 percent higher than that of the semi-persistent trading and 4 percent lower than that of the dynamic trading. From the economic perspective of operators, intelligent trading provides 19 percent more profit than semi-persistent trading and 8 percent less profit than intelligent trading. Intelligent trading also has much lower overhead in the blockchain than dynamic trading, while being very close to the lowest overhead of semi-persistent trading.