Blockchain-based 6G Inter-Provider Agreements: Auction vs. Marketplace

Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) can create an agreement that enables stakeholders in the telco world to interact and share services while maintaining trust. As a result, the multiple 6G network stakeholders can perform a role in a marketplace as service providers or consumers. Blockchain and DLT have immutability, transparency, and decentralized ledgers, making them critical in a future-generation network where various administrative domains are controlled by separate operators and resource providers to share resources (virtual network functions, services, or slices). Similarly, an auction-based approach based on the blockchain can eliminate intermediaries while ensuring transparency to increase competitiveness in such an environment. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a solution based on blockchain, considering both approaches (i.e., marketplace and auction). Furthermore, we use IOTA Tangle and IPFS to reduce the transaction and gas costs, which is one of the challenges for Ethereum-based use cases. We also provide experimental evaluations of our use case to analyze the results. It is observed that both options expand the consumer's possibilities to choose, and creating smart contracts adds trust. Moreover, the potential advantages of the proposed solutions are demonstrated through emulation results as a comparison to the traditional ways of doing such agreements between inter-provider domains. We measure transaction latency and the maximum latency observed in our proposed approach is ˜ 25ms. Similarly, the average response time for the Ethereum-based approach is double our proposed approach's average response time. Consequently, the services are completed relatively fast with less latency and faster response time. Moreover, it is observed that in ˜ 2000s, up to 30 services can be completed in a marketplace approach and up to 20 25 services in the auction. Lastly, the results also explain that by using IOTA-EVM, we can have feeless transactions, and IPFS helps reduce the storage cost up to ˜ 80%. © 2022 IEEE.