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

Dinh C Nguyen, Pubudu N Pathirana, Ming Ding, Aruna Seneviratne

arXiv:1912.05062v1cs.NIcs.ITeess.SP

TL;DR

5G networks face decentralization, transparency, interoperability, privacy, and security challenges. This paper surveys blockchain integration across 5G technologies, services, and IoT applications, finding promising benefits while identifying QoS-related research challenges.

  • Problem

    5G platforms must address decentralization, transparency, data interoperability, privacy, and security vulnerabilities while supporting heterogeneous devices and applications.

  • Method

    The paper provides a state-of-the-art survey of blockchain integration with 5G technologies, services, and Internet of Things applications.

  • Results

    The survey finds blockchain can support 5G through security, system performance, resource management, decentralization, privacy, service efficiency, and system simplification.

  • Takeaways & Limitations

    Blockchain-5G integration is a promising research area spanning cloud and edge computing, network functions, slicing, communications, services, and IoT domains.

  • Takeaways & Limitations

    Blockchain consensus can require substantial computation, storage, bandwidth, and energy, potentially causing latency, congestion, and QoS degradation.

Abstract

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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.

I. INTRODUCTION

5G connects heterogeneous devices and supports demanding services, but its decentralized, service-oriented architecture introduces major security, privacy, transparency, and management challenges. The paper surveys how blockchain may address these challenges across 5G technologies, services, and IoT applications.

  • 5G supports enhanced mobile broadband, massive machine-type communication, and ultra-reliable low-latency communication for diverse applications.
  • Existing 2G–4G security techniques cannot address 5G data tampering and the broader privacy requirements of emerging services.
  • 5G technologies including SDN, NFV, network slicing, and D2D communications increase security-management complexity across massive numbers of devices.
  • Blockchain offers decentralized, immutable, transparent, private, and secure storage and transaction management for heterogeneous 5G data.
  • The survey reviews blockchain for cloud and edge computing, SDN, NFV, network slicing, D2D communication, 5G services, and 5G IoT domains.

Section I: Introduction

This section introduces the paper’s organization and blockchain fundamentals, including its decentralized operation, core components, and programmable smart contracts. It frames these concepts as prerequisites for understanding blockchain applications in 5G.

  • The survey is organized around blockchain and 5G backgrounds, enabling technologies, 5G services, 5G IoT applications, and future research directions.
  • 1) Main components of blockchain:: Blockchain distributes replicated databases across participants, using consensus to maintain agreement without a single controlling entity.
  • 1) Main components of blockchain:: A data block contains transaction records and a header, while hash links connect blocks and support traceability and resistance to data modification.
  • 1) Main components of blockchain:: Distributed ledgers share and replicate transaction databases among peer-to-peer participants, who use consensus to agree on ledger state.
  • 1) Main components of blockchain:: Proof of Work secures Bitcoin through computational puzzles but has high resource consumption.
  • 1) Main components of blockchain:: Smart contracts are self-executing blockchain applications that automatically enforce contractual obligations without middlemen.

2) Main characteristics of blockchain:

Blockchain’s main characteristics include decentralization, immutability, transparency, and security/privacy, but their usefulness depends on the 5G context. Transparency can also expose sensitive information, making privacy protection necessary.

  • Blockchain immutability uses verified, timestamped transactions, cryptographic hashing, and links to previous blocks to keep ledger data unchanged.
  • Blockchain is not necessarily optimal for every 5G scenario because distributed ledgers incur costs and their properties must match the application.
  • Decentralization removes dependence on central authorities by using consensus protocols to validate transactions and reduce single-point failure risks.
  • Permissionless blockchain transparency lets participants view, verify, and track transactions, supporting openness and fairness in 5G ecosystems.
  • Blockchain security and privacy rely on asymmetric cryptography using private and public keys to secure transactions between participants.
  • Transparency exposes open data, while privacy concerns whether sensitive information can be inferred from that data.

B. 5G networks

5G networks target major gains in capacity, latency, mobility, connectivity, availability, energy use, and bandwidth while relying on enabling technologies such as cloud/edge computing, SDN, NFV, slicing, D2D, and mmWave communication.

  • 5G aims to address rising traffic and network-capacity demands beyond previous cellular standards.Its architecture incorporates multiple technologies to support diverse services and applications.
  • 1-10Gbps connections are targeted for endpoints, with up to 20Gbps in certain scenarios.
  • 1ms or less than 1ms latency is a stated 5G service target.
  • 5G targets mobility up to 500km/h and support for massive machine-type communication in dense networks.
  • 5G targets 99.999% availability, 90% lower network energy usage, 10-100x more connected devices, and 1000x bandwidth per unit area.
  • Cloud/edge computing, SDN, NFV, network slicing, D2D communication, and mmWave communication underpin 5G performance objectives.

2) 5G design principles:

The paper frames blockchain–5G integration around 5G’s software-based, virtualized, flexible architecture and blockchain’s potential to address security, privacy, networking, and service-management challenges.

  • 5G design principles: 5G uses software and virtualization to pursue flexibility, configurability, and scalability.
  • 5G design principles: Network slicing enables dynamic network-function placement for flexible and extensible communication infrastructure.
  • 5G design principles: SDN separates control from forwarding and supports programmable network-resource management, while security mechanisms can be deployed where required.
  • 5G design principles: Blockchain offers immutability, decentralization, transparency, and privacy through a secure distributed ledger for 5G data and management.
  • 5G design principles: 5G’s dynamic technologies and services create security and privacy requirements beyond data integrity, especially across SDN, NFV, slicing, and D2D communications.
  • 5G design principles: The survey highlights blockchain opportunities for 5G in security enhancements, system-performance improvements, and network simplification.

2) System performance improvements:

Blockchain is presented as a way to improve 5G performance and simplify management by replacing centralized intermediaries with decentralized verification, storage, sharing, and service transactions.

  • System performance improvements: Decentralized verification and smart contracts can reduce latency by avoiding centralized authority for resource requests and data access.
  • System performance improvements: Blockchain can establish direct provider–user communication and potentially reduce communication latency, transaction costs, and management costs.
  • System performance improvements: Blockchain-based ledgers can implement access, service responses, resource trading, and payment among network participants without additional management infrastructure.
  • System performance improvements: Cloud computing in 5G provides storage and computation resources but retains centralized security, availability, privacy, integrity, immutability, and transparency challenges.
  • System performance improvements: Blockchain cloud frameworks use immutable access records, smart contracts, metadata hashes, distributed key management, and interconnected cloud ledgers for security and data sharing.

B. Blockchain for mobile edge computing

Blockchain is surveyed as a security and management layer for mobile edge computing and SDN, supporting trusted authentication, immutable storage, task verification, and distributed control across 5G environments.

  • Blockchain for mobile edge computing: Mobile edge computing supports ubiquitous services, scalability, and reduced network-management complexity for growing IoT and 5G demands.
  • Blockchain for mobile edge computing: MEC faces attacks, untrusted configuration, privacy and immutability risks, and disruption from compromised edge nodes.
  • Blockchain for mobile edge computing: Blockchain-based edge systems provide distributed authentication, secure access records, activity tracking, trusted content caching, and secure vehicular communication.
  • Blockchain for mobile edge computing: Blockchain and off-chain storage can preserve immutable ledgers while supporting vehicular profiles, sensor processing, car-sharing, and smart-city device communication.
  • Blockchain for mobile edge computing: Blockchain authentication layers can monitor and verify tasks offloaded to MEC servers, protecting edge computation from external attacks.
  • Software Defined Networking: SDN’s control–data-plane separation broadens the attack surface, while centralized controllers create vulnerabilities and single-point failure risks.
  • Software Defined Networking: Blockchain-based SDN research distributes controller information exchange and targets secure authentication, interoperability, and decentralized management.
  • Software Defined Networking: A blockchain-secured SDI framework combines edge resources with peer-to-peer transactions for regulation-compliant healthcare data sharing and sensitive-data computation.

D. Blockchain for Network Function Virtualization (NFV)

Blockchain is surveyed as a means to address security, orchestration, configuration, and trust challenges introduced by NFV and network slicing in 5G. The reviewed approaches use ledgers, consensus, smart contracts, and decentralized management across infrastructure and administrative domains.

  • Network Function Virtualization (NFV): NFV separates network functions from hardware through NFVI, VNFs, and management components, improving deployment flexibility but creating new security challenges.These challenges include data leakage across cloud providers, attacks involving shared infrastructure and virtual machines, and insecure orchestrator-to-hardware communication.
  • Network Function Virtualization (NFV): Blockchain can support NFV orchestration, secure network-function delivery, and auditing of system state against insider and external attacks.The survey identifies authenticity, integrity, and non-repudiation as the blockchain properties underlying these functions.
  • Blockchain-based NFV designs: Reviewed NFV designs apply blockchain to secure service-function-chain orchestration, authenticate orchestration commands, and audit VNF configuration updates.Examples include PBFT-based BSec-NFVO, a blockchain VMOA ledger, and smart contracts for network-slice management and VNF configuration operations.
  • Blockchain-based NFV designs: Smart contracts and blockchain-based agreements can make NFV infrastructure selection and multi-domain management more trustworthy.BRAIN uses reverse auctions for infrastructure discovery and selection, while decentralized applications provide authentication across administrative domains.
  • Network slicing: Network slicing partitions shared physical hardware into virtual networks for specific services, but introduces inter-slice threats and inter-domain resource-harmonization problems.Slices contain VNFs associated with physical network functions and rely on cloud computing and storage resources.
  • Network slicing: Blockchain-based slicing approaches support reliable end-to-end slices, resource management, and trust between slice providers, operators, and resource providers.Examples include V2X slice security layers, blockchain brokering with slice smart contracts, and slice-leasing ledgers intended to reduce service creation time.

F. Blockchain for D2D communication

Blockchain is surveyed as a tool for securing and coordinating D2D communications, which provide proximity-based device connectivity but introduce data leakage, trust, management, and performance risks. The reviewed mechanisms support incentives, authentication, data exchange, computation offloading, and content caching.

  • D2D communication: D2D communication lets nearby mobile devices communicate directly without an access point or cellular core network, but creates security, management, and performance challenges.The survey highlights data-leakage risks in untrusted environments and the need to combine low-latency exchange with security.
  • Blockchain-enabled D2D security and sharing: Blockchain-based content caching uses edge servers for mining and incentives to encourage mobile devices to store and share content securely.The award policy stimulates participation in the mining and sharing process, improving the robustness and security of the D2D network.
  • Blockchain-enabled D2D security and sharing: Consensus-based blockchain mechanisms authenticate D2D channel-state information before users validate, sign, and record broadcast messages.The described design uses an integrity chain and a fraud chain for CSI-related verification.
  • D2D computation and offloading: Blockchain platforms coordinate D2D computation offloading by managing requests, matching users with participants, and involving edge servers in task execution.Users submit offloading requests, while other users and edge servers determine participation in the computation process.
  • D2D computation and offloading: Smart contracts support delegated authorization for D2D access to IoT resources by immutably recording authorization and payment information.Blockchain records hashes of exchanged information, while smart contracts concatenate authorization requests.
  • D2D computation and offloading: Blockchain integration supports secure mobile-data transfer, decentralized incentives, computation offloading, and content caching without third-party intervention.The reviewed systems combine blockchain trust and traceability with edge-server processing for efficient execution.
  • Additional D2D applications: Consortium blockchain and smart contracts are also applied to protect encrypted-image feature extraction and enable transparent data exchange and lightweight access control.These designs address privacy leakage, secure monitoring, identity authentication, and reduced computational and communication costs.

IV. BLOCKCHAIN FOR 5G SERVICES

Blockchain is surveyed as a means to improve 5G services through decentralization, transparency, immutability, availability, permissionless access, security, and privacy. Applications include spectrum management and data sharing, where smart contracts and distributed ledgers support resource exchange, verification, and access control.

  • Blockchain-based 5G services use decentralization, privacy, immutability, and traceability to support spectrum management, data sharing, virtualization, resource management, interference management, federated learning, and security services.
  • A. Spectrum management: Blockchain-based spectrum applications address scarcity, centralized attack points, unfair competition among MNOs, and security risks in UAV spectrum sharing.
  • A. Spectrum management: Blockchain can replace centralized spectrum authorities and improve spectrum sharing through reduced intermediary overhead, stronger integrity and privacy, and better security and performance.
  • A. Spectrum management: Smart contracts and distributed ledgers provide transparent, auditable, immutable, available, and permissionless spectrum sharing and payment.
  • A. Spectrum management: Blockchain verifies and authenticates spectrum-leasing transactions, supporting auctions, spectrum access, scalability, power efficiency, and protection against DoS attacks.
  • B. Data sharing: For 5G data sharing, blockchain enforces access policies and distributes processing across nodes, reducing delivery latency and network congestion while adding traceability, security, privacy, and tamper resistance.

C. Network virtualization

Blockchain and smart contracts are surveyed as tools for securing and automating 5G network virtualization and resource management. The reviewed approaches target trustworthy orchestration, network slicing, resource trading, and decentralized allocation across heterogeneous services and devices.

  • C. Network virtualization: Blockchain and smart contracts can automate distributed transactions and create secure end-to-end network slices for virtual services with diverse requirements and resiliency.
  • C. Network virtualization: Blockchain-based architectures secure virtual-machine orchestration, NFV configuration and migration, and SDN-controlled spectrum assignment through transaction verification, authentication, consensus, and auditability.
  • D. Resource management: Heterogeneous computation, memory, bandwidth, channel, and storage capacities and demands make optimal allocation across 5G slices and services a critical challenge.
  • D. Resource management: Blockchain enables distributed resource allocation while retaining core-network features and strong security for edge, cloud, and slice providers and mobile users.
  • D. Resource management: Smart-contract auctions allocate network resources transparently, while blockchain-based schemes support resource balancing, decentralized edge allocation, and monitoring of resource trading and payments.
  • D. Resource management: Blockchain consensus can authenticate user priorities and use asynchronous Byzantine agreement to support trustworthy and fair resource sharing.

E. Interference management

The survey describes blockchain applications for interference management and federated learning in 5G and IoT networks. Interference mechanisms use distributed incentives and access control, while federated-learning systems use blockchain for coordination, validation, reputation, and privacy-preserving data sharing.

  • E. Interference management: Interference management becomes more difficult with dense 5G IoT deployments because inter-cell, intra-cell, and inter-user interference can accompany high-rate, low-delay services.
  • E. Interference management: Blockchain supports interference management through monetary mechanisms, interference pricing, power control, and distributed transmission strategies.
  • E. Interference management: Blockchain consensus can authenticate channel-state information and prioritize resource allocation, with simulations reporting improved spectral efficiency.
  • E. Interference management: Blockchain-enabled IoT interference studies analyze blockchain transaction throughput and communication throughput under transaction-node interference.
  • E. Interference management: Blockchain-based interference management remains in its infancy, with few investigated works and open challenges involving throughput and security.
  • F. Federated learning: Blockchain-based federated learning removes centralized training coordination, validates local results, supports reliable worker selection, and preserves privacy by sharing models rather than raw data.
  • F. Federated learning: Federated learning combined with blockchain is also applied to data relevance, precision medicine, and distributed healthcare data analysis.

H. Security services

Blockchain is surveyed as a security-service layer for 5G and IoT systems, addressing access control, data integrity, authentication, privacy, and provenance. The reviewed architectures replace or supplement centralized trust with distributed ledgers, consensus, cryptography, and smart contracts.

  • H. Security services: Blockchain-based security services respond to rising 5G traffic and valuable user data by providing access control, integrity, authentication, and related protections against threats and attacks.
  • H. Security services: Smart contracts and blockchain ledgers restrict network-resource permissions to legitimate users, devices, and machines through policy-based access control.
  • H. Security services: Blockchain verifies data integrity without relying solely on third-party auditors, using distributed ledgers, Proof-of-Trust, cloud verification, and consensus-based checking.
  • H. Security services: Blockchain makes cloud and peer-to-peer storage integrity verification more open, transparent, and auditable while supporting tamper-resistant metadata.
  • H. Security services: Blockchain authentication schemes use smart contracts and distributed verification to provide decentralized access management, privacy, and authentication for edge, fog, and vehicular networks.

V. BLOCKCHAIN FOR 5G IOT APPLICATIONS

Blockchain is being integrated with 5G IoT applications to improve security, privacy, interoperability, and decentralized data or resource management across healthcare and smart-city settings.

  • 5G IoT applications span smart healthcare, smart cities, transportation, smart grids, and UAVs, where untrusted data-sharing environments create security and privacy risks.Blockchain is surveyed as a mechanism for securing transactions and verifying user access.
  • Smart healthcare: Blockchain-supported healthcare systems target secure, interoperable data exchange among patients, providers, applications, and organizations.Smart contracts can support access verification, while blockchain-secured peer-to-peer and edge or cloud architectures protect health-data sharing.
  • Smart city: Smart-city architectures combine blockchain with edge, fog, cloud, and machine-learning systems for secure processing, auditing, storage, and sharing of IoT data.Reported benefits include lower communication costs, stronger security, and reduced single-point-of-failure risks.
  • Smart city: Blockchain-based Mobility-as-a-Service models replace centralized management with more secure and decentralized operation while improving trust and transparency among stakeholders.

C. Smart transportation

Blockchain is applied across smart transportation and smart-grid scenarios to decentralize trading, authenticate transactions, protect user information, and improve resilience against cyberattacks.

  • Smart transportation: Blockchain enables peer-to-peer electric-vehicle energy transactions and decentralized storage for vehicle-to-grid operations.Electric vehicles can support load flattening, peak shaving, and frequency regulation.
  • Smart transportation: Consortium blockchains and edge computing can secure vehicle-to-grid trading while reducing blockchain processing latency and burden.Authorized energy aggregators verify transactions, while edge servers perform block creation and mining.
  • Smart transportation: Blockchain-based vehicular networks address the limitations of centralized SDN control by distributing decisions closer to individual controllers.
  • Smart grid: In smart grids, blockchain supports decentralized energy management, privacy protection, traceability, transparent trading, and transaction verification through smart contracts.Distributed consensus across energy servers and users is described as improving resistance to cyberattacks.
  • Smart grid: Blockchain-based smart-grid frameworks also combine edge servers, mutual authentication, and key agreement to support timely analysis and secure energy services.

E. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

Blockchain is surveyed as a foundation for secure, decentralized UAV networking and 5G IoT applications, including spectrum sharing, content dissemination, autonomous cooperation, and edge-assisted transport.

  • UAVs are increasingly used as flying IoT devices in military, security, healthcare, surveillance, and vehicle-monitoring applications, but mobility creates networking challenges.
  • Consortium blockchain can provide distributed spectrum trading and sharing between aerial and terrestrial communication systems.
  • Permissioned blockchain supports decentralized content storage and consensus-based verification in UAV ad hoc networks without external authorities.The proposed model targets spoofing, denial-of-service, eavesdropping, and data-tampering issues.
  • Blockchain can connect UAVs, IoT devices, robots, and other agents through peer-to-peer ledgers for autonomous data exchange and collaborative work.
  • Blockchain-enabled UAV systems combine shared keys, cloud or edge computing, smart contracts, and distributed ledgers for secure data acquisition, access verification, caching, and surveillance.The neural blockchain-based transport model shares the ledger among UAVs, MEC servers, and users identified by public keys.
  • Across surveyed 5G IoT applications, blockchain secures transactions and verifies user access in environments vulnerable to cyberattacks and information-profile exposure.

B. Challenges and Open issues

The survey identifies scalability, security, privacy, and QoS as major open issues for blockchain-5G integration, especially under the data, latency, and resource demands of 5G IoT systems.

  • Blockchain-5G integration faces major scalability and performance challenges involving throughput, storage, and networking.
  • Blockchain performance and scalability: Current blockchain throughput can be far below non-blockchain payment systems, limiting high-volume 5G transaction processing.Bitcoin and Ethereum process up to 4 and 20 transactions per second, compared with 1667 for Visa and 193 for PayPal.
  • Blockchain performance and scalability: On-chain storage forces nodes to process and retain complete transaction copies, burdening resource-constrained IoT devices and expanding blockchain capacity requirements.
  • Blockchain performance and scalability: Consensus validation and mining consume bandwidth, computation, and transmission power, creating latency and resource conflicts with ultra-dense 5G networks and sub-millisecond latency targets.
  • Blockchain security and privacy: Blockchain security remains exposed to attacks such as 51% attacks, transaction manipulation, double spending, and smart-contract vulnerabilities.Smart-contract bugs can cause privacy leakage or logic modifications.
  • Blockchain security and privacy: Off-chain cloud storage can reduce blockchain burden but may expose personal information through unauthorized processing or external attacks.
  • Mining and consensus can degrade QoS through long latency, high energy consumption, bandwidth demands, and network congestion.Proposed responses include lightweight consensus, compressed storage, and lightweight block validation.

C. Future research directions

The survey identifies blockchain-enabled opportunities across 5G technologies, services, IoT domains, and future 6G networks, while highlighting that this research area remains at an early stage. It also points to open research challenges and directions for future blockchain–5G systems.

  • Integrating machine learning with blockchain for 5G: Machine learning and blockchain are being integrated for secure and intelligent 5G resource management, orchestration, and wireless access selection.
  • Blockchain for big data: Blockchain-based data management is presented as supporting transparency, trustworthiness, authentication, and reliability for sharing big data among service providers and data owners.
  • Blockchain for 6G: For 6G, the survey outlines blockchain opportunities in security, privacy, traceability, and decentralized spectrum sharing, alongside future research challenges and directions.
  • Blockchain for key 5G technologies: The survey examines blockchain integration with cloud and edge computing, SDN, NFV, network slicing, and D2D communication.
  • Blockchain for 5G services: It analyzes blockchain applications in spectrum management, data sharing, network virtualization, resource and interference management, federated learning, privacy, and security.
  • Blockchain for 5G IoT: Blockchain–5G IoT applications are reviewed across smart healthcare, smart cities, smart transportation, smart grids, and UAVs.
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