Review
Blockchain for 5G and beyond networks: A state of the art survey

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2020.102693Get rights and content

Abstract

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. However, 5G systems still remain a number of security challenges that have been mentioned by researchers and organizations, including decentralization, transparency, risks of data interoperability, and network privacy vulnerabilities. Furthermore, the conventional techniques may not be sufficient to deal with the security requirements of 5G. As 5G is generally deployed in heterogeneous networks with massive ubiquitous devices, it is quite necessary to provide secure and decentralized solutions. Motivated from these facts, in this paper we provide a state-of-the-art survey on the integration of blockchain with 5G networks and beyond. In this detailed survey, our primary focus is on the extensive discussions on the potential of blockchain for enabling key 5G technologies, including cloud computing, edge computing, Network Function Virtualization, Network Slicing, and D2D communications. We then explore and analyse the opportunities that blockchain potentially empowers important 5G services, ranging from spectrum management, data sharing, 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 a wide range of popular use-case domains, such as smart healthcare, smart city, smart transportation, smart grid and UAVs. The main findings derived from the comprehensive survey on the cooperated blockchain-5G networks and services 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.

Introduction

The fifth generation 5G technology, referred to as beyond 2020 communications systems, represents the next important phase of the global telecommunication evolution, with recent successful deployments in several areas across almost all the continents.1 The 5G cellular networks are characterized by three major features supporting for Enhanced Mobile Broadband, Massive Machine Type Communication and the provisioning of Ultra-reliable Low Latency Communication services (Agiwal et al., 2016). Here, the definition of 5G networks refers to the 5G cellular networks that has been empowered by the evolution of cellular technology over the long history, from 1G cellular networks to 4G cellular networks (Panwar et al., 2016). Driven by the explosion of smart mobile devices and the rapid advances of communication technologies, 5G could be a technical enabler for a plethora of new innovative business opportunities and industrial applications, and facilitates the seamless collaboration across domains by interconnecting billions of devices. The 5G cellular networks promise to revolutionize global industries and provide immediate impacts on customers and business stakeholders. The main vision of future 5G services is to provide a customized and advanced user-centric value, enabling human interconnection to meet the ever growing demands of user traffic and emerging services. To achieve these objectives, according to Panwar et al. (2016), Gupta and Jha (2015) and Hossain and Hasan (2015), several underlying wireless technologies have been proposed to enable 5G cellular networks, including cloud computing, edge computing, Network communication. Function Virtualization (NFV), Network Slicing, and D2D. However, the rapid surge and breakneck expansion of 5G wireless services also pose new security challenges such as network reliability, data immutability, privacy that must be considered and solved before wide deployments.

The 5G cellular technologies will support new service delivery models and thus further exacerbate the security challenges. Unlike the legacy cellular networks, 5G wireless networks are going to be decentralized and ubiquitous service-oriented which have a special emphasis on security and privacy requirements from the perspective of services. In particular, the security management in 5G is more complex due to various types of and a massive number of devices connected. How to provide an open data architecture for flexible spectrum sharing, data sharing, multiuser access, for example, to achieve ubiquitous 5G service provisions while ensuring high data immutability and transparency is a critical issue. Succinctly, the security architectures of the previous generations lack the sophistication needed to secure 5G networks.

In the 5G era, immutability, decentralization and transparency are crucial security factors that ensure the successful roll-out of new services such as IoT data collection, driverless cars, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Federated Learning (FL). Among the existing technologies, blockchain is the most promising one to meet these new security requirements and reshape the 5G communication landscape (Christidis and DevetsikIoTis, 2016; Zheng et al., 2017). Hence, 5G needs blockhain for its wide 5G service deployments. Technically, blockchain is a distributed ledger that was firstly used to serve cryptocurrency Bitcoin (Nakamoto et al.) for economic transactions. The blockchain is basically a decentralized, immutable and transparent database. The concept of blockchain is based on a peer-to-peer network architecture in which transaction information is managed flexibly by all network participants and not controlled by any single centralized authority. In particular, the blockchain technology boasts a few desirable characteristics of decentralization, immutability, accountability, and truly trustless database storage which significantly improve network security and save operational costs (Tschorsch and Scheuermann, 2016). The rapid development and the adoption of blockchain as a disruptive technology are paving the way for the next generation of financial and industrial services. Currently, the blockchain technology has been investigated and applied in various applications, such as Internet of Things (IoT), (Ali et al., 2018a), edge computing (Yang et al., 2019a), smart city (Xie et al., 2019a), vehicular networks (Yli-Huumo et al., 2016), and industries (Rabah, 2017).

For the inherent superior properties, blockchain has the potential to be integrated with the 5G ecosystems to empower mobile networks and services as shown in Fig. 1. Due to the advanced technical capabilities to support future network services, blockchain was regarded as one of the key technical drivers for 5G at the 2018 Mobile World Congress (MWC) (Mwc barcelona 2020). It is also predicted that blockchains would be a key technology in reaping real benefits from 5G networks, for giving birth to novel applications from autonomous resource sharing, ubiquitous computing to reliable content-based storage and intelligent data management (Blockchain: A key enabler for 5G).

The combination of blockchain and 5G is also expected to pave the way for emerging mobile services (The road to the next wave of tech: 5G +blockchain). In fact, 5G is all about connecting heterogeneous devices and complex networks interconnecting more than 500 billion mobile devices by 2030 (Internet of things 2016). Besides, the emerging Internet of Things (IoT), and Massive Machine Communications (MMC) are predicted to create over 80 billion connections by 2020 (Internet of things (IoT)). In such a context, the ultra-dense small cell networks, a fundamental component of 5G infrastructure, will provide connections and energy efficiencies of radio links with high data rates and low latencies. However, it introduces trust and secure interoperability concerns among complex sub-networks. Therefore, providing a reliable cooperation among heterogeneous devices is vitally important for 5G mobile networks. In this regard, blockchain with its immutable and decentralized transaction ledgers can enable distributed massive communication with high security and trustworthiness (Salman et al., 2018). Moreover, network slicing associated with other emerging technologies such as cloud/edge computing, NFV, and D2D communication are also key enablers for future 5G networks and services. A big challenge for current 5G platforms is the need to guarantee an open, transparent, and secure system among the extraordinary number of resources and mobile users. Blockchain with its innovative concepts of decentralized operation can provide a high level of data privacy, security, transparency, immutability for storage of 5G heterogeneous data (Chaudhry, 2018). Blockchain is thus expected to be an indispensable tool to fulfill the performance expectations for 5G systems with minimal costs and management overheads.

There are several survey articles in the literature that considers issues of the integration of blockchain and 5G networks. The authors in Dai et al. (2019) only provided a brief introduction of the blockchain adoption in secure 5G resource management and reliable network orchestration. The survey in Jovović et al. (2019) provided a short survey on the potential of blockchain for 5G networks in Industry 4.0. Similarly, the study in Mistry et al. (2020) presented a brief review on the benefits of blockchain for 5G-based industrial IoTs. The survey in Jovović et al. (2018) gives a brief introduction of the potential combination of blockchain and 5G networks. Furthermore, the authors in Aggarwal et al. (2019a) analyse the use of blockchain for solving privacy and security issues in smart communities with a number of key industrial applications such as healthcare, transportation, IoT, and smart grid. Another paper in Makhdoom et al. (2019) presents a survey on the security properties of blockchain that can apply to IoT networks for solving security, privacy and network performance challenges. The authors in Mehta et al. (2020) present a survey on the use of blockchain for UAV, a 5G IoT application in future networks. Meanwhile, the paper in Prerna et al. (2020) provided a systematic survey of various D2D based content caching techniques used for popular content sharing among different devices in the 5G (see Table 1).

Currently, there are a number of research proposals working around the combination of blockchain and 5G networks. However, there is no existing survey which provides a comprehensive discussion and analysis on the use of blockchain for 5G, including 5G technologies, 5G services and 5G IoT. Motivated by this limitation, in this paper we present a review on the combination of blockchain and 5G with extensive discussions in various 5G aspects. We identify a number of key research questions that motivate our survey in this paper as summarized in Table 2.

To our best knowledge, we are the first to provide a comprehensive survey on the integrated use of blockchain and 5G technologies and services. In this paper, we provide an extensive survey on the integration of blockchain and 5G technologies for providing services, including cloud computing, edge computing, Network Function Virtualization, Network Slicing, and D2D communication. We also detail the use of blockchain for supporting important 5G services, ranging from spectrum management, data sharing, network virtualization, resource management to mitigating interference, federated learning, privacy and security attacks. The potential of blockchain in 5G IoT networks is also discussed through a number of use-case domains, such as smart healthcare, smart city, smart transportation, smart grid and UAVs. Besides, we highlight the research challenges and open issues, and point out the promising future research directions related to the blockchain-5G integrations. The main contributions of this survey article are highlighted as follows:

  • 1.

    We conduct a state-of-the-art survey on the convergence of blockchain and 5G, starting with an analysis on the background, definitions as well as highlighting the motivations of the integration of these two emerging technologies.

  • 2.

    We provide a review on the adoption of blockchain for enabling key 5G technologies, with a particular focus on cloud computing, edge computing, Network Function Virtualization, Network Slicing, and D2D communication.

  • 3.

    We present a systematic discussion on opportunities that blockchain brings to 5G services, including spectrum management, data sharing, network virtualization, resource management, interference management, federated learning, privacy and security services.

  • 4.

    We investigate the potential of leveraging blockchains in 5G IoT networks and review the latest developments of the integrated blockchain-5G IoT applications in a number of domains, ranging from smart healthcare, smart city, smart transportation to smart grid and UAVs.

  • 5.

    Based on the comprehensive survey, we summarize the main findings, highlight research challenges and open issues, and point out several future research directions.

A systematic mapping study was selected as the research method for this paper, aiming to provide an overview of the research related to the conjunction of 5G and blockchain. We follow the systematic mapping process as shown by (Yli-Huumo et al., 2016) because our objective is to explore the existing studies on the blockchain-5G integration. The systematic mapping process is depicted in Fig. 3 with five key steps. The first stage is the definition of the research questions, which are listed in Table 2. By identifying the key research questions, we can provide an overview on the blockchain and 5G networks, and recognize the key issues of 5G that can be solved by using the blockchain technology. The second stage is to search for all the relevant scientific papers on the research topic. We map the papers related to technical aspects of blockchain and 5G and using only the terms Blockchain and 5G as the search strings so that we can filter and select the most relevant technical papers for our survey. Then we chose the scientific databases for the searches. We decided to focus on peer-reviewed, high-quality papers published in conferences, workshops, symposiums, books and journals related to the research topic. We used four scientific databases for paper retrieval, including (1) IEEE Xplore, (2) ACM Digital Library, (3) Springer Link, and (4) ScienceDirect. The third stage is to screen all related papers based on their titles. For example, we screen all technical papers that mention blockchain and 5G technologies, i.e. D2D, cloud/edge computing. Meanwhile, we exclude papers without high content quality, papers without text availability and papers that were not written by English. The fourth stage is keywording. We read the abstract and identified keywords and concepts that reflected the contribution of the paper. Then, we used the keywords to cluster and form categories for the mapping of the studies. The final stage is data extraction that gathers all information needed to address the research questions of this mapping study. We focus on the analysis of the key findings of technical studies according to the sub-sections as pre-defined in Fig. 2.

The structure of this survey is shown as Fig. 2. Section 2 presents an overview of blockchain and 5G networks, and then highlight the motivations for the integration of blockchains in 5G networks and services. In Section 3, we present a state-of-the-art survey on the convergence of blockchain and key 5G technologies, namely cloud computing, edge computing, Network Function Virtualization, Network Slicing, and D2D communication. We also provide a comprehensive discussion on the use of blockchain for supporting fundamental 5G requirements, ranging from spectrum management, data sharing, network virtualization, resource management to interference management, federated learning privacy and security services in Section 4. The benefits of blockchain for 5G IoT applications are analysed in details in Section 5, with a focus on popular applications such as smart healthcare, smart city, smart transportation, smart grid and UAVs. We summarize the key main findings in Section 6, and the potential research challenges and future research directions are also outlined. Finally, Section 7 concludes the paper.

Section snippets

Blockchain

Blockchain is mostly known as the technological platform behind Bitcoin (Nakamoto et al.). The core idea of a blockchain is decentralization. This means that its database does not place in a central location, but is distributed across a network of participants (i.e. computers). This decentralized concept provides high robustness and security for database stored on blockchain with no single-point failure. Importantly, blockchain is visible to each member in the network. This is enabled by a

Blockchain for enabling 5G technologies

Reviewing state-of-the-art literature works (Agiwal et al., 2016; Gupta and Jha, 2015; Hossain and Hasan, 2015), we found that blockchain has mainly cooperated with the key 5G enabling technologies including cloud computing, edge computing, Network Function Virtualization, Network Slicing, and D2D communication. Motivated by this, in this section, we present a review on the integration of blockchain and such 5G technologies. The benefits of blockchain for different 5G use cases and applications

Blockchain for 5G services

Blockchains offer tremendous potential for improving existing 5G services and applications by supporting 5G technologies as discussed in the previous section. This vision can be achieved by taking advantage of interesting features that blockchains offer such as decentralization, privacy, immutability, and traceability. Blockchain can be regarded as a natural choice to facilitate the next-generation mobile communication networks for better 5G services. In this section, we provide an extensive

Blockchain for 5G IoT applications

Nowadays, Internet of Things (IoT) have developed rapidly to provide ubiquitous services for almost all industrial applications. The evolution of the 5G networks would be the key enabler of the advancement of the IoT. A number of key enabling 5G technologies such as edge/cloud computing, NFV, D2D communication are developed to facilitate future IoT, giving birth to a new model as 5G IoT, which is expected to disrupt the global industry (Li et al., 2018c; Ejaz et al., 2016). Especially, in

Main findings, challenges and future research directions

Integrating blockchain in the 5G mobile networks is a hot research topic now. Many research efforts have been devoted to the development of blockchain technology for 5G mobile networks. In the previous sections, we have presented a state of the art review on the current achievements in the blockchain adoption in 5G networks. Specially, we have provided an extensive discussion on the convergence of blockchain into key 5G enabling technologies, namely cloud computing, edge computing, Network

Conclusions and discussions

Blockchain is an emerging technology that has drawn significant attention recently and is recognized as one of the key enablers for 5G networks thanks to its unique role to security assurance and network performance improvements. In this paper, we have explored the opportunities brought by blockchain to empower the 5G systems and services through a state-of-the-art survey and extensive discussions based on the existing literature in the field. This work is motivated by the lack of a

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.

Dinh C. Nguyen received the B.S. degree (first class honors) in electrical and electronic engineering from Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, Vietnam, in 2015. Currently, he is a Ph.D. scholar in the School of Engineering, Deakin University, Victoria, Australia. His research interests focus on security and privacy of Internet of Things, mobile cloud computing, and smart e-healthcare. He is currently working on adopting blockchain for secure communication networks including clouds, IoTs,

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    Dinh C. Nguyen received the B.S. degree (first class honors) in electrical and electronic engineering from Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, Vietnam, in 2015. Currently, he is a Ph.D. scholar in the School of Engineering, Deakin University, Victoria, Australia. His research interests focus on security and privacy of Internet of Things, mobile cloud computing, and smart e-healthcare. He is currently working on adopting blockchain for secure communication networks including clouds, IoTs, and healthcare. He is a recipient of the Data61 PhD scholarship, CSIRO, Australia.

    Pubudu N. Pathirana (SMIEEE) was born in 1970 in Matara, Sri Lanka, and was educated at Royal College Colombo. He received the B.E. degree (first class honors) in electrical engineering and the B.Sc. degree in mathematics in 1996, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 2000 from the University of Western Australia, all sponsored by the government of Australia on EMSS and IPRS scholarships, respectively. He was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Oxford University, Oxford, a Research Fellow at the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and a Consultant to the Defence Science and Technology Organization (DSTO), Australia, in 2002. He was a visiting associate professor at Yale University in 2009. Currently, he is an Associate Professor with the School of Engineering, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia and his current research interests include Bio-Medical assistive device design, human motion capture, mobile/wireless networks, rehabilitation robotics and radar array signal processing.

    Ming Ding (M′12-SM′17) is a Senior Research Scientist at Data61 (previously known as NICTA), CSIRO, Australia. He has authored over 80 papers in IEEE journals and conferences, all in recognized venues, and about 20 3GPP standardization contributions, as well as a Springer book “Multi-point Cooperative Communication Systems: Theory and Applications”. Currently he holds 14 US patents and co-invented another 100+ patents on 4G/5G technologies in CN, JP, EU, etc. Currently, he is an editor of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. He was the lead speaker of the industrial presentation on unmanned aerial vehicles in IEEE Globecom 2017, which was awarded as the Most Attended Industry Program in the conference. Also, he was awarded in 2017 as the Exemplary Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

    Aruna Seneviratne is the foundation Chair in Telecommunications and holds the Mahanakorn Chair of Telecommunications, and the leader of the Mobile Systems Research Group at NICTA. His current research interests are in mobile content distributions and preservation of privacy. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Bath, UK. He has held academic appointments at the University of Bradford, UK, Curtin University, and UTS.

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