Blockchain Enabled Opportunistic Fog-based Radio Access Network: A Position Paper

Fog-based radio access network (F-RAN) have the potential to meet the stringent latency and bandwidth requirements of next-generation mobile networks. However, the current F-RAN is implemented mainly by utilizing dedicated hardware and does not leverage on the available large number of distributed edge devices. This motivated us to recently propose the idea of an opportunistic fog RAN (OF-RAN) which introduces the concept of a virtual fog access points (v-FAP) formed by two or more local edge devices (referred as service nodes), and monitored by physical FAPs (referred to as seed nodes). Some of the challenges arising from having many devices opportunistically deployed to serve client nodes are accessing, forming and managing them. In this paper, we propose to harness blockchain technology for assigning roles and permissions to service nodes and seed nodes in our OF-RAN, and supporting the formation and management of v-FAPs. For this blockchain architecture, the distributed formation and management algorithm (DFMA) is implemented as a script in the smart contract. The blockchain then executes the logic of the smart contract while considering the resources from all service nodes participating in the system. By integrating OF-RAN with blockchain systems and smart contracts, it is possible to provide verifiable automation of physical processes involving different nodes.