Blockchain-Enabled Network Slicing

Abstract

To the beginning of the next decade, the world community will become a more digitalized, information-guided, and intelligently managed ecosystem with needs for ubiquitous connectivity for a plethora of various traditional and emerging services. Next-generation mobile communications play a steering role in this evolution. Network slicing is a perspective resource provisioning technique in the future design of mobile systems with the purpose to meet heterogeneous service requirements. The integration of blockchain technology in mobile networks will allow more efficient and transparent resource management and utilization while reducing its administration costs and complexity of negotiation. Moreover, security aspects are of great importance, too. Motivated by these facts, this paper seeks to provide a comprehensive survey on the fusion of blockchain technology with 5G and beyond systems in the network slicing domain. An efficient and realistic network slicing framework based on blockchain technology is proposed. Lastly, the survey is completed by shedding new light on open research directions in this emerging field.