Blockchain for 5G and Beyond Networks: A State of the Art Survey

By Dinh C. Nguyen, Pubudu N. Pathirana, Ming Ding, Aruna Prasad Seneviratne. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 2019

342 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The fifth generation (5G) wireless networks are on the way to be deployed around the world. The 5G technologies target to support diverse vertical applications by connecting heterogeneous devices and machines with drastic improvements in terms of high quality of service, increased network capacity and enhanced system throughput. Despite all these advantages that 5G will bring about, there are still major challenges to be addressed, including decentralization, transparency, risks of data interoperability, network privacy and security vulnerabilities. Blockchain can offer innovative solutions to effectively solve the challenges in 5G networks. Driven by the dramatically increased capacities of the 5G networks and the recent breakthroughs in the blockchain technology, blockchain-based 5G services are expected to witness a rapid development and bring substantial benefits to future society. In this paper, we provide a state-of-art survey on the integration of blockchain with 5G networks and beyond. Our key focus is on the discussions on the potential of blockchain for enabling key 5G technologies, including cloud/edge computing, Software Defined Networks, Network Function Virtualization, Network Slicing, and D2D communications. We then explore the opportunities of blockchain to important 5G services, ranging from spectrum management, network virtualization, resource management to interference management, federated learning, privacy and security provision. The recent advances in the applications of blockchain in 5G Internet of Things are also surveyed in various domains, i.e. smart healthcare, smart city, smart transportation, smart grid and UAVs. The main findings derived from the survey are then summarized, and possible research challenges with open issues are also identified. Lastly, we complete this survey by shedding new light on future directions of research on this newly emerging area.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1c7e468e222c6462a194a9cc8282230419812868

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Citations in the corpus

Blockchain for the Internet of Vehicles Towards Intelligent Transportation Systems: A Survey (2020, background): “function virtualization software-defined networking (SDN), network slicing, device-to-device communications, and spectrum management is presented in [55]–[59].”
Survey on 6G Frontiers: Trends, Applications, Requirements, Technologies and Future Research (2021, background): “Authors in [241] have presented how blockchain can be leveraged to remove inter-”
A Survey on Blockchain for Big Data: Approaches, Opportunities, and Future Directions (2020, background): “Other surveys in [18, 21, 34] also mention the interplay between blockchain and big data, but they only provide brief introductions on this topic without an in-depth survey unlike our paper.”
6G Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey (2021, background): “This can be done by formulating a data transmission efﬁciency maximization problem that can be solved by taking large-scale channel state information, on-board energy, and interference temperature constraints into account.”
A Survey of Multi-Access Edge Computing in 5G and Beyond: Fundamentals, Technology Integration, and State-of-the-Art (2019, neutral): “However, managing mobility and ensuring reliability are quite challenging in such environments.”
Federated Learning Meets Blockchain in Edge Computing: Opportunities and Challenges (2021, methodology): “Block n (3)”
The Road Towards 6G: A Comprehensive Survey (2021, background): “Recently, the potential of blockchain in 5G and beyond systems has been initially investigated in the literature [162].”
6G for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) Communications: Enabling Technologies, Challenges, and Opportunities (2020, background): “Compared to traditional security and privacy techniques, the use of blockchain can provide a wide range of enhanced security and privacy services without requiring any third parties [51].”
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data for Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic: A Survey on the State-of-the-Arts (2020, background): “• Blockchain: Basically, blockchain is defined as a decentralized, immutable and public database, where each transaction is verified by all the nodes in the network, which is enabled by consensus algorithms [137].”
Federated Learning for Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey (2021, background): “Moreover, to protect the sharing process against external attacks, a blockchain [50] is integrated with the FL architecture to build immutable data blocks that are controlled by all parties for transparency and improvement of data ownership without the need for any central authority.”