Blockchain for Network Slicing in 5G and Beyond: Survey and Challenges

Abstract

Network slicing has gained popularity as a result of the advances in the fifth generation (5G) mobile network. Network slicing facilitates the support of different service types with varying requirements, which brings into light the slicing-aware next generation mobile network architecture. While allowing resource sharing among multiple stakeholders, there is a long list of administrative negotiations among parties that have not established mutual trust. Distributed ledger technology may be a solution to mitigate the above issues by taking its decentralized yet immutable and auditable ledger, which may help to ease administrative negotiations and build mutual trust among multi-stakeholders. There have been many research interests in this direction which focus on handling various problems in network slicing. This paper aims at constructing this area of knowledge by introducing network slice from a standardization point of view to start with, and presenting security, privacy, and trust challenges of network slicing in 5G and beyond networks. Furthermore, this paper covers distributed ledger technologies basics and related approaches that tackle security, privacy, and trust threats in network slicing for 5G and beyond networks. The various proposals proposed in the literature are compared and presented. Lastly, limitations of current work and open challenges are illustrated as well.