Blockchain and Smart Contract for Decentralized and Secure Spectrum Management Toward 6G – Beyond Hype
Bikramjit Choudhury, Pranav Kumar Singh, Panchanan Nath, Ujjal Roy, Anshuman Kalla · 2024
Blockchain, a prominent distributed ledger technology (DLT), is poised to drive the evolution of next-generation mobile networks. Recent research has increasingly focused on the versatile applications of blockchain technology and smart contracts within the 6G ecosystem. Beyond merely underpinning the technical core of 6G networks, blockchain holds the potential to empower unprecedented applications associated with 6G, including Digital Twins, Industry 5.0, Holographic Telepresence, and Extended Reality (XR). Leveraging its key attributes—security, decentralization, transparency, nonrepudiation, cost-efficiency, and high availability—blockchain can facilitate essential technical aspects of 6G, such as security and privacy compliance, trustless trading, federated slice brokering, and the coexistence of local private networks and mobile network operators. Spectrum, a finite and valuable resource, necessitates optimal and transparent utilization. Notably, efficient spectrum management, vital for fostering an open ecosystem, can be significantly bolstered by harnessing blockchain technology. In this chapter, we explore how blockchain and smart contracts have been utilized and can be further leveraged to ensure secure, transparent, trusted, fair, and efficient spectrum management in the context of B5G and 6G networks.