Distributed Ledger Technologies for Network Slicing: A Survey

Network slicing is one of the fundamental tenets of Fifth Generation (5G)/Sixth Generation (6G) networks. Deploying slices requires end-to-end (E2E) control of services and the underlying resources in a network substrate featuring an increasing number of stakeholders. Beyond the technical difficulti...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Javed, F, Antevski, K, Mangues-Bafalluy, J, Bernardos, CJ
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2022
País:España
Institución:Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC)
Repositorio:r-CTTC. Repositorio Institucional Producción Científica del Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC)
OAI Identifier:oai:cttc.fundanetsuite.com:p6541
Acceso en línea:https://cttc.fundanetsuite.com/Publicaciones/ProdCientif/PublicacionFrw.aspx?id=6541
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Blockchains
Network slicing
Distributed ledger
5G mobile communication
Network function virtualization
Stakeholders
Next generation networking
Distributed ledger technologies
blockchain
network slicing
beyond 5G
6G
smart contracts
Descripción
Sumario:Network slicing is one of the fundamental tenets of Fifth Generation (5G)/Sixth Generation (6G) networks. Deploying slices requires end-to-end (E2E) control of services and the underlying resources in a network substrate featuring an increasing number of stakeholders. Beyond the technical difficulties this entails, there is a long list of administrative negotiations among parties that do not necessarily trust each other, which often requires costly manual processes, including the legal construction of neutral entities. In this context, Blockchain comes to the rescue by bringing its decentralized yet immutable and auditable lemdger, which has a high potential in the telco arena. In this sense, it may help to automate some of the above costly processes. There have been some proposals in this direction that are applied to various problems among different stakeholders. This paper aims at structuring this field of knowledge by, first, providing introductions to network slicing and blockchain technologies. Then, state-of-the-art is presented through a global architecture that aggregates the various proposals into a coherent whole while showing the motivation behind applying Blockchain and smart contracts to network slicing. And finally, some limitations of current work, future challenges and research directions are also presented.