A proof-of-majority consensus protocol for blockchain-enabled collaboration infrastructure of 5G network slice brokers

With network slicing technology, 5G changes the classical mobile network business model from a network-operator-oriented business to a more open system with multiple stakeholders. In this context, a network slice broker plays the role of agency between network resource providers and vertical service providers, to lease and provide on-demand network slice services. In practice, a single network slice broker normally owns limited types of network slices. And a collaboration infrastructure could be built up to enable network slice sharing among multiple network slice brokers, so as to improve user experience, and enhance the resource utilization rate. However, a major challenge with such an infrastructure is how to support fair and secure slice trading process among multiple un-trusted network slice providers. Blockchain technology, on the other side, brings in high opportunities to implement a fair and secure trading system without a trusted third-party. In view of this observation, this paper proposes a design of blockchain-enabled collaboration infrastructure for network slice brokers, where a group of registered brokers can trade their network slices in a fair and secure manner. To enhance the accountability of slice trading records, transactions are verified and sorted by each broker node, which are further packed into blocks and appended to a shared ledger maintained by each member in the collaboration network. More specifically, we design a Proof-of-Majority (PoM) consensus protocol to sort slice trading transactions before packing transaction blocks of the shared ledger. Furthermore, an optimization for the basic PoM protocol is discussed, with dependency resolving strategy to improve system performance. Experiments are conducted to verify the feasibility of our proposal.