Blockchain-based Service Orchestration for 5G Vertical Industries in Multi-Cloud Environment

Blockchain technologies are gradually being deployed in a variety of industries, including telecommunications. In this paper, due to the strict governance of telecommunication infrastructure, we propose a permissioned distributed ledger (PDL)-based blockchain supported architecture for a network management and orchestration platform. The work focuses on creating a trusted environment for both Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) for managing the lifecycle of network services (e.g., instantiation, scaling, termination, etc.) in a multi-cloud environment. We also validate our proposed approach with an experimental scenario using the Quorum blockchain network (BCN) to measure various performance metrics (e.g., number of transactions and blocks, time to write, and transactions per second) of different service orchestrator (SO)-related instantiation metrics. Our evaluation results show that the values for the service instantiation time and the corresponding BCN metrics can be completely different, suggesting that some logs arrive very quickly and generate a high transaction load, while others take longer and generate a low number of transactions. As a solution, at the end of the paper, we also provide some recommendations for appropriate optimizations during transfer of SO-related logs to BCNs and some observed challenges. IEEE