Telecom Archives – Hyperledger Foundation

Jan 04

Solution Brief: Self-Assessing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in Telecom

By Nikos Kapsoulis and Gordon Graham Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Research, Special Interest Group, Telecom

The Hyperledger Telecom Special Interest Group, in collaboration with LF Networking, has just published a solution brief on the self-assessment of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in telecom.

An SLA defines the services delivered by a provider to a client and the metrics for measuring those services. If the actual services received by the client do not meet the SLA guarantees promised by the provider, the agreement has been violated. In that case, the provider may owe the client a refund or whatever penalty is defined in the SLA.

The solution brief includes a high-level overview of a proposed solution for self-assessing SLAs. This proposed solution uses Hyperledger Fabric blockchain technology to tackle the gray areas of conventional SLA assessment.

This unique architecture provides a trusted and privacy-preserving network that can precisely monitor and compute SLA metrics, with full transparency for both provider and client.

Achieving effective SLA self-assessments will benefit everyone in the ecosystem by building trust, removing friction, streamlining processes, and saving costs.

The Problem: Lack of transparency

An effective SLA clearly defines all performance metrics and parameters.

But in most conventional SLAs, the provider assesses their own performance using their own tools and frameworks. The client generally has no way to see how these metrics are monitored or calculated. This increases the risk of biased results that favor the provider.

This lack of transparency means the client could well suffer from misunderstandings, missed violations, and insufficient refunds. All this undermines trust between the provider and the client.

The Solution: Using blockchain for transparent self-assessment

This solution brief proposes a novel architecture that is based on the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain framework and Hyperledger Fabric Private Chaincode (FPC). As shown in the figure below, the installed Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) provides secure and private monitoring, and computation of all performance metrics governed by the SLA.

Both client and provider benefit from the presented solution, which builds trust where little previously existed. More details are provided in the full white paper.

The scientific research performed on SLA Self-Assessment and applied to the telecom context adheres to work accomplished under the Pledger project.

The full paper is available to download here.

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Get Involved with the Group

To learn more about the Hyperledger Telecom Special Interest Group, check out the group’s wiki and mailing list. If you have questions, comments or suggestions, feel free to post messages to the list. And you’re welcome to join any of the group’s upcoming calls to meet group members and learn how to get involved. On February 9 at 9:00 am PT, the authors will be presenting the paper during the Telecom Special Interest Group call. All are welcome to join.

Acknowledgements

The Hyperledger Telecom Special Interest Group would like to thank the following people who contributed to this solution brief: Nima Afraz, David Boswell, Gordon Graham, Nikolaos Kapsoulis, Antonios Litke, Alexandros Psychas, Vipin Rathi, and Theodora Varvarigou.

Jun 29

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Hyperledger Technologies at Work: Production Solutions in Telecom

By Hyperledger Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Telecom

It’s #HyperledgerTelecom month so we are spotlighting some of the exciting ways Hyperledger technologies are at work across the industry. Below are some noteworthy production solutions in the telecom market that are built on Hyperledger platforms.

GSMA eBusiness Network

GSMA eBusiness Network, a blockchain solution developed by GSMA, aims to automate the complex business processes for wholesale roaming, ensuring readiness in the 5G and IoT era. The new private-permissioned industry-wide blockchain network. The GSMA eBusiness Network, built on Hyperledger Fabric, has the potential to support secure and transparent inter-operator settlements through decentralised applications and facilitate the digital transformation of wholesale roaming by improving operational efficiency, cutting costs, and mitigating errors and disputes. It was announced as a commercial offering just this week.

Tech Mahindra’s plug-n-play solution to curb spam calls

By 2018, the spam call situation had grown grim in India, a country with more than 1 billion active mobile subscribers, causing bad customer experience and propagating of fake news and financial scams. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) acknowledged UCC (Unsolicited Commercial Communication) or spam calls were a major nuisance to telecom subscribers across the country and a growing menace that needed to be tackled with immediate effect. Though TRAI had established a “Do Not Disturb” (DND) list with more than 230 million subscribers on it, unregistered telemarketers continue to spam customers, obtaining their consent through fraudulent and questionable tactics. Through various internal and external assessments, DLT was selected as the underlying technology to curb the menace.

Tech Mahindra developed a plug-n-play solution, built on Hyperledger Fabric, to mitigate the problem. With the solution successfully deployed across three major telcos in India, Tech Mahindra has access to >50% market. This solution has potential to have a global impact. Tech Mahindra has already reached out to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S. market and is exploring opportunities to socialize it with U.S.-based telcos to address the pain points of robo-calling and caller ID spoofing are key pain areas that can be addressed by our solution.

Trust Your Supplier

Trust Your Supplier (TYS) is an innovative solution developed in a partnership between IBM and Chainyard to address the inefficiencies and risks associated with supplier information management. Built on a Hyperledger Fabric framework, it works with a network of enterprise buyer organizations, including three of the leading telecom companies: BT, Nokia and Vodafone.

These companies are working on TYS together to bring digital transformation to the telecom industry. As an integral part of their strategy, the TYS blockchain platform is bringing transparency and supplier visibility at every touchpoint, which supports compliance activities such as diversity, sustainability, cyber security, and anti-corruption.

Chime in on social with your own examples of Hyperledger in action in the telecom space here using #HyperledgerTelecom.

Telecom updates from Hyperledger Global Forum

At Hyperledger Global Forum, there was a range of telecom sessions led by experts from carriers, technology leaders and academia, including:

Dispute Management using Blockchain – Rangesh Sripathi & Ahmed Khan, Verizon

Building Transformative Platforms to Scale 5G Ecosystems using Hyperledger – Utpal Mangla & Mathews Thomas, IBM

Access for the Next Billion – Decentralizing Authentication and Handover in 4G LTE/5G – Sudheesh Singanamalla, University of Washington

We also have an active community for those interested in participating and contributing to telecom solutions. The Hyperledger Telecom Interest Group (SIG) is focused on technical and business-level conversations about appropriate use cases for blockchain technology in the telecom industry. All are welcome.

Cover image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay.

Jun 22

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Scaling 5G Ecosystems using Hyperledger Fabric

By Amandeep Singh, Mathews Thomas, Utpal Mangla, IBM Blog, Telecom

Transformation of industries by building next generation 5G Ecosystem platforms is a huge addressable market to the tune of over hundreds of billions of dollars and much more as businesses evolve. The market is growing at a rapid speed with double digit CAGR growth.

It is important to understand and clearly explain 5G and EDGE. What are they?

5G is the next generation of mobile, wireless technology, which will dominate the 2020s.

5G is designed to provide faster mobile broadband, support billions of IoT devices and enable low latency and high reliability communications
5G will be deployed globally and will eventually make 3G obsolete.
5G will deploy in phases. New core deployments based on NFV, Cloud and Edge technologies have been initiated by carriers.

Edge Computing allows dynamic delivery and execution of computation to the most sensible parts of networks.

Edge serves multiple use cases across industries. Prominent ones which are already taking advantage include industrial, telco, media, entertainment, consumer and oil & gas.
Edge provides containerized compute resources with varying degrees of distance from consuming resources as well as varying latency, power and compute requirements.
Edge can function both with and without connectivity.

Blockchain plays an important role in the rollout of 5G so let’s examine the 5G landscape to understand where blockchain fits in.

5G landscape

The diagram below provides a high-level overview of the 5G ecosystem:

The following are some of the key components that form the edge ecosystem:

Cloud: This could be a public or private cloud, which can be a repository for the media container-based workloads including applications and machine learning models. These clouds also host and run the applications that are used to orchestrate and manage the different edge nodes.
Network edge: This is generally part of the Communication Service Providers (CSP) core network and can host larger edge applications and data.
Edge cluster/gateway: An edge cluster/gateway is a multi-edge compute node that is located in a remote operations facility such as a factory, retail store, hotel, distribution centre, or bank. An edge cluster/gateway is typically constructed with racked computers, enterprise application workloads and shared services.
Edge device: An edge device is a special-purpose piece of equipment that also has compute capacity integrated into that device. Edge devices include an assembly machine on a factory floor, an ATM, an intelligent camera, or an automobile.

There are multiple entities that need to partner in this ecosystem such as providers of the containers at the application and network level, managers of the end-to-end network and suppliers of the infrastructure from the underlying hardware to the software infrastructure. SLA’s need to be met, issues resolved quickly and upgrades implemented in a timely manner. Such collaboration is an ideal environment for blockchain to be used to improve transparency, traceability and security across the different partners.

We will now look at specific use cases to better understand where blockchain fits into this ecosystem.

Use cases

There are multiple use cases that can benefit from 5G, including the following:

Spectrum management: Managing spectrum is important for 5G, and using blockchain provides multiple benefits. Blockchain eliminates the need of trusted external authorities such as spectrum licenses and band managers. Transparency is increased since all spectrum transactions are recorded on blockchain ledgers. The blockchain consensus mechanism ensures the reliability of the spectrum services and immutability ensures accuracy of the data.
Infrastructure management: 5G networks construction requires a huge capital investment. Compared with 4G networks, 5G needs more than 5 times as many base stations. The operating cost of 5G will also be high because each 5G base station’s power consumption is 2.5-4 times higher than the 4G base station. Building this infrastructure means investment needs to be found, leases need to be created, services need to be evaluated, settlements need to happen across parties and then the actual building of the infrastructure. Blockchain is an ideal tool to ensure the collaborators can work together to implement the 5G network.
Slice management: Network slicing is an important part of 5G as it enables a single network to provide different amounts of resources to different types of traffic so important traffic can be allocated greater bandwidth. To do this, multiple components in the network, such as the 5G core, vRAN and transport layer from multiple vendors, support the creation of the slice and appropriate SLA’s are met. Blockchain provides the immutability, transparency and security needed so that these different parties can create and manage the slice.
Industry-specific use cases: There are multiple 5G industry use cases that will function more effectively supported by blockchain. For example, a worker safety system that ensures workers are safe in an environment and alerted when exposed to a dangerous substance with possible recommendations on next steps will have components running on the edge, network core and cloud. Edge applications need to respond as soon as the danger is identified while network slices may be created to ensure there is appropriate bandwidth assigned to communications for first responders and those in danger. Ensuring such a system operates effectively requires multiple parties to collaborate effectively in a 5G environment, and blockchain plays an important role in making this possible.

Implementing many of the 5G use cases requires effective management of the network functions. We will now provide an architectural overview of how the software defined network functions can be managed.

Hyperledger Fabric for 5G and Edge network function management, auditing, and inventory/certificate management

The process to manage the lifecycle of 5G network functions for the provisioning of end-to-end services can be quite complex, involving multiple parties and components including physical and virtual products. Hyperledger Fabric is a powerful tool that can be used to manage provenance on many aspects of network workloads and provide new value-added services, such as dynamic pricing and enhanced security, with full visibility into the supply chain for all concerned parties.

Below is a solution architecture for application of Hyperledger Fabric for 5G network and Edge lifecycle management of the network functions:

Graphical user interface, application

Description automatically generated

Some of the key functionality that Hyperledger Fabric will provide in the 5G and Edge network ecosystem play include:

Smart contract to handle the license agreements and intelligent SLA management between service providers, xNF vendors, equipment providers and application vendors. This can also help to manage the licensing process where the nature of licenses can be very different for each vendor, but the key components could be made uniform to make the on-boarding easier.
Management and tracking of service / xNF certification process of import transactions from CI/CD process that affects multiple parties like xNF vendors, system integrators, cloud providers.
Asset tracking of xNF artifacts and license keys managed by blockchain as assets to keep track of version updates, assignment to deployments and their utilization. This enables transparent visibility to all involved parties and also helps with billing and settlement.
License validation throughout lifecycle events of xNFs such as install, heal, scale and migrate. This capability also integrates with operations and lifecycle management of network services based on these xNFs.
Smart contract to efficiently manage the assignment of licenses to different instance deployments between different customers. This goes towards cost and revenue management.

Next steps

As clients embark on the 5G and EDGE journey integrated with blockchain, it is important to mitigate challenges by following the right steps and processes to create a 5G-enabled ecosystem platform. Keys to success includes

Having the right people and mindset: Building a team of experts using right combination of skills which include industry experts, digital strategists, IoT specialists, blockchain platform SMEs, data scientists and process specialists
Effectively applying 5G enabled technologies: Building a catalog of workflows powered by leading technologies such as AI, automation, AR/VR, EDGE analytics
Embracing new ways of working: Taking advantage of enterprise design thinking, virtual tools, distributed agile and industry best practices
Leveraging local and global capabilities: Creating the best blockchain-enabled platform to ensure it can be scaled globally by building leading edge local and global ecosystems

{Note: For more on this topic, see the presentation Building Transformative Platforms to Scale 5G Ecosystems using Hyperledger from Hyperledger Global Forum 2021.}

Cover image by ADMC from Pixabay

Feb 25

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Solution Brief: Decentralized ID and Access Management (DIAM) for IoT Networks

By Nima Afraz, Connect Centre for Future Networks and Communications, Trinity College Dublin Blog, Special Interest Group, Telecom

The Telecom Special Interest group in collaboration with the Linux Foundation’s LF Edge initiative has published a solution brief addressing the issues concerning the centralized ID and Access Management (IAM) in IoT Networks and introducing a distributed alternative using Hyperledger Fabric.

The ever-growing number of IoT devices means data vulnerability is an ongoing risk. Existing centralized IoT ecosystems have led to concerns about security, privacy, and data use. This solution brief shows that a decentralized ID and access management (DIAM) system for IoT devices provides the best solution for those concerns, and that Hyperledger offers the best technology for such a system.

The IoT is growing quickly. IDC predicts that by 2025 there will be 55.7 billion connected devices in the world. Scaling and securing a network of billions of IoT devices starts with a robust device. Data security also requires a strong access management framework that can integrate and interoperate with existing legacy systems. Each IoT device should carry a unique global identifier and have a profile that governs access to the device.

In this solution brief, we propose a decentralized approach to validate and verify the identity of IoT devices, data, and applications. In particular, we propose using two frameworks from the Linux Foundation: Hyperledger Fabric for the distributed ledger (DLT) and Hyperledger Indy for the decentralized device IDs. These two blockchain frameworks provide the core components to address end-to-end IoT device ID and access management (IAM).

The Problem: IoT Data Security

The ambitious IoT use cases including smart transport infer a massive volume of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-road communications that must be safeguarded to prevent malicious activity and malfunctions due to single points of failure.

The Solution: Decentralized Identity

IoT devices collect, handle, and act on data as proxies for a wide range of users, such as a human, a government agency, or a multinational enterprise. With tens of billions of IoT devices to be connected over the next few years, numerous IoT devices may represent a single person or institution in multiple roles. And IoT devices may play roles that no one has yet envisioned.

A decentralized ID management system removes the need for any central governing authority and makes way for new models of trust among organizations. All this provides more transparency, improves communications, and saves costs.

The solution is to use Hyperledger technology to create a trusted platform for a telecom ecosystem that can support IoT devices throughout their entire lifecycle and guarantee a flawless customer experience. The solution brief includes Reference Architecture and a high-level architecture view of the proof of concept (PoC) that IBM is working on with some enterprise clients. This PoC uses Hyperledger Fabric as described above.

Successful Implementations of Hyperledger-based IoT Networks

IBM and its partners have successfully developed several global supply-chain ecosystems using IoT devices, IoT network services, and Hyperledger blockchain software. Two examples of these implementations are Food Trust and TradeLens.

The full paper is available to read at: https://www.hyperledger.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/HL_LFEdge_WhitePaper_021121_3.pdf

Get Involved with the Group

Acknowledgements

The Hyperledger Telecom Special Interest Group would like to thank the following people who contributed to this solution brief: Nima Afraz, David Boswell, Bret Michael Carpenter, Vinay Chaudhary, Dharmen Dhulla, Charlene Fu, Gordon Graham, Saurabh Malviya, Lam Duc Nguyen, Ahmad Sghaier Omar, Vipin Rathi, Bilal Saleh, Amandeep Singh, and Mathews Thomas.

Dec 21

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Hyperledger Fabric at the heart of a telecommunication carrier ecosystem

By Utpal Mangla, Luca Marchi, Amandeep Singh and Mathews Thomas, IBM Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Telecom

Telecommunications are a central aspect of our daily life: we are always connected through our phones as are the majority of people on the planet. To support our connectivity, communication service providers have been building a network of infrastructure and business relationships for the past few decades. The new trends of the industry (global mobile, Internet of Thing and 5G) are bringing new challenges and a new business approach. Recent projects within the industry show that blockchain is a technology that can support the industry transformation.

A common scenario

In 2018, 93 million* Americans traveled abroad, according to the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Travel and Tourism Office. Of course, all of them had a cellphone. When they landed on foreign soil, their phones connected to a foreign network. Their American carriers charged them for every phone call, text or data consumed abroad through the foreign network. In the back end, the foreign network providers charged the American ones for letting the subscribers using the local infrastructure.

Now imagine this scenario repeating itself for the millions of people traveling every day across any country in the world or for the millions that make international calls from their home or offices to other countries. You can get an idea of how much data carriers need to manage to successfully charge each other for these services.

Every month billions of transactions need to be tracked, validated, reconciled, cleared and settled based complex international agreements between competing parties. That makes for an ideal scenario where blockchain can streamline operations and lift carriers from the burden of manual processes, legal disputes and unforeseen costs.

A growing interest in blockchain

Several telecom industry organizations, such as the GSMA and ITW GLF-backed Communication Blockchain Network, are showing interest in blockchain as the solution of choice for the management of high-volume transactions.

The main reason for this choice is that, to solve an industry-wide problem, they are looking for an industry-wide solution. A blockchain network, through its distributed ledger technology, can provide the reach and the governance required to push shared standards among competitors in the same sector in a collaborative way.

In addition, blockchain enables an open and interoperable ecosystem based on shared standards, where each player is able to bring their own data, safely share it and contribute to the achievement of their business goals.

Looking closer to the specific process of clearing and settling large amounts of transactions, blockchain has capabilities that match perfectly with the issues faced by carriers.

Distributed ledger technology allows parties to see the same data (values, volumes, etc.) for each transaction. Smart contracts translate complex agreement into digital code, so that they do not need to be manually executed any longer. Consensus mechanisms reduce the disputes at the end of the settlement process.

These capabilities allow telecommunication companies to save time and labor dedicated to manual processes and to reduce the cash tied up in disputes.

Hyperledger Fabric is a central enabler of such use cases. In fact, Fabric is designed to support enterprise implementation, providing scalability, security and operational tools that make enterprise transactions safe and scalable.

But there is more

The telecommunication industry is facing one of the greatest shifts in its history due the arrival of Internet of Things (IoT)and 5G. Both technologies are supporting the voice to data substitution. Historically, voice was the driver of large volumes of transactions, but now data have a larger and growing share thanks to the role of machines in generating large amounts of IoT input.

The abundance and growth of data poses carriers with the challenge of storing, managing, and exchanging that information in order to drive business value. Hyperledger Fabric can be the enabling platform of high value and innovative use cases such as data access control (empowering final users to decide how and who should have access to the data they generate), device identity (integrating blockchain, IoT and security to record device on the network and prevent harmful usage) or data exchange (create marketplaces of accessible data where data supplier are rewarded by data consumer).

To conclude, the industry is strengthening its global ecosystem and is looking for a technology that fosters collaboration and creativity. Hyperledger Fabric is an ideal fit and can allow greater efficiencies and new capabilities that have not been explored yet.

* https://travel.trade.gov/tinews/archive/tinews2019/20190402.asp

Oct 08

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How Hyperledger Fabric is impacting the Telco, Media and Entertainment industry

By Utpal Mangla, Luca Marchi, Amandeep Singh and Mathews Thomas, IBM Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Telecom

The rise of blockchain

Blockchain is already a reality in the Telecommunication, Media and Entertainment (TME) industry. In fact, many companies, both established and start-ups, have implemented blockchain-based solutions to automize, digitize and re-invent some of their processes.

Like other industries, TME is characterized by the lack of visibility, transparency and auditability of some of its processes, making asset transactions less efficient, thus generating both extra costs and revenue leakage. In telecommunication, a good example of such a process is wholesale voice settlements. Carriers around the world exchange large amounts of money for interconnection costs, but there are no industry standards to ensure consistency and transparency. Each report is subject to dispute and reconciliation. In the media industry, we all know how difficult it is for artists and music labels to track the revenues that are due to them from streaming and video platforms.

Hyperledger helps in bringing efficiency to TME operations

The stakeholders in the TME industry are pioneers in the application of blockchain to solve some of the critical industry issues. In particular, they recognize that a platform designed for the enterprise like Hyperledger Fabric provides tangible value-adds such as privacy, transparency, trust and security. Leveraging these key characteristics, telco and media companies have started building consortia and projects to validate the value of the technology. These consortia can be categorized into three categories: operations-focused, customer experience and full revenue generating ecosystems.

In the first category, companies collaborate to improve back end processes that take place between them, with the goal of eliminating redundant costs and activities. This helps improve productivity and efficiency in the value chain. In a nutshell, this is an efficiency play. Some processes touch all players in the industry. Examples include roaming settlements for telecommunications or digital advertising supply chains for the media industry. (Recently, Syniverse and IBM went live with the first blockchain-based roaming solution compliant with the new GSMA billing standard.) Alternatively, some processes may interest only a major player and its closest suppliers.

Reinventing customer experience with Hyperledger

The second category, customer experience-focused consortia, revolves around improving the engagement of the customer rather than the efficiency of the processes. The main financial goal is not cost cutting but revenue generation, either through new services or new business models.

In this context, the sky is the limit: use cases are several and very different. When the goal is to provide a better customer experience, Hyperledger technologies can be used to improve customer engagement and make client-facing activities easier and less redundant. For example: IBM uses Hyperledger Fabric to simplify the dispute resolution process for commercial financing. Fabric is also used to automatically enforce warranties or reduce the time needed to port your mobile number from one carrier to another, thus improving the customer experience.

On the other side, blockchain can be used to create new services for telecommunication and media companies. For decades, telcos have harbored an ambition to get into the mobile payment business. Now, with blockchain, they have an easy and secure way to implement digital wallets, create tokens and exchange them in their own network or with other networks. The same can apply to the gaming industry, where the concept of credits and digital token has been popular in the last few years but was hard to monetize.

Carriers can also now provide digital identity services. Blockchain is the ideal platform for creating a trusted identity, and carriers are in the perfect position to enable subscribers with digital identity and to develop an ecosystem of applications. IBM’s Verify Credentials creates a decentralized approach to identity management – enabled by blockchain – building on top of open standards in combination with Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF), World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other standards groups

Hyperledger Fabric is the foundation of new industry ecosystems

Finally, the third category, the ecosystems, comprises consortia that cover the entire industry. Consortia turn into ecosystems over time, when an initial application becomes an industry-wide platform, setting the standards for the whole industry and allowing for flexible, modular and open participation, in a “network of networks” fashion. The founder of the ecosystem can extract high value from the platform and become a winner.

The application of Hyperledger Fabric in the TME industry has not achieved the level of maturity necessary for the establishment of a real ecosystem, but a few companies and industry organizations are already laying the foundations for the future ecosystems.

There are several organizations that are creating consortia and implementing blockchain networks.

Companies that interact frequently are getting together to form small groups of three or four participants to streamline existing processes. They can either be telecom carriers that need to facilitate settlements among themselves or music streaming services that want to remunerate music labels faster and more accurately.
Regulators are playing a big role: in India, the local telecom regulatory agency (TRAI) mandated the use of blockchain to prevent unsolicited commercial communication. Indian mobile subscribers can opt out of telemarketing calls and a blockchain distributed ledger will manage this information for carriers, content providers and the regulators. IBM is working with TRAI and Bharti Airtel on the commercial deployment that will initially help the operator curb unwanted calls and messages from advertisers. It will also help the operator in Mobile Number Portability, interconnect settlements, supply chain streamlining and content partner settlement.
The European Union, through the Horizon 2020 fund, is financing several blockchain projects to improve the way information and infrastructure is shared within telecom companies.
Service providers are very active organizations that are leveraging their neutrality to build industry-wide ecosystems. They can be either established platform providers that already serve the majority of their market or new start-ups trying to disrupt the competition. In the first case, service providers are improving their value proposition through blockchain. In the second case, start-ups are rethinking the way the industry works.
Finally, industry standard organizations are gathering their members to define how blockchain can transform their industry. This is happening both in telco and media. In telco, organizations such as the GSMA, TWI GLF and the Bridge Alliance are advocating for blockchain with the goal of establishing common standards for the most immediate blockchain use cases (e.g., wholesale and roaming settlements). In the media space, AdLedger is leveraging blockchain to re-shape the digital advertising industry.

2020 is going to be a KEY year for blockchain in the TME industry: we are going to see the outcome of the work done in the last couple years and the move to production of many consortia.

Cover image by pisauikan from Pixabay

Sep 16

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Hyperledger is Enabling New Blockchain-Based Business Models for 5G

By Nima Afraz, Connect Centre for Future Networks and Communications, Trinity College Dublin Blog, Hyperledger Fabric, Telecom

The fifth generation of cellular networks or 5G promises revolutionary improvements compared to the previous generation that reaches beyond merely multiplying the bandwidth and reducing latency. 5G is expected to enable a wide range of new internet-based services such as vehicular communications and Smart City infrastructure that, in addition to connectivity, require on-demand fine-grained infrastructure and resource access to operate. Hence, the allocation of the underlying resources has to be capable of supporting and adapting to sudden changes in demand for resources and be able to flexibly provide customized bundles of resources to fit the demands of the vertical industries using the 5G infrastructure.

Entering the 5G market, an operator may experience up to 65% increase in RAN deployment and infrastructure costs [1]. Discovering new ways to more efficiently allocate resources can, to some extent, alleviate the massive increase in the infrastructure cost. Network and infrastructure sharing is one of the solutions that could help major operators to gain considerable returns by leasing out portions of their idle resources to other service providers that o are willing to operate in the same geographical region.

A Decentralized Marketplace for Network Infrastructure Sharing

The practice of infrastructure/network sharing dates back to the previous generations of cellular networks. However, these sharing models were typically in the form of bilateral agreements and were limited to long-term sharing of passive and seldom active network resources. Such sharing models cannot support either the on-demand short term sharing requests or the larger markets where the parties involved in resource trading exceed only two operators. On the other hand, the intense competition in the telecoms industry rules out the prospect of a centralized marketplace where a trusted intermediary is in charge of the market and makes the final decision regarding the allocation of the resources and the price. Therefore, a decentralized approach is required to incentivize participation by the infrastructure providers, network operators, and over-the-top service providers.

Hyperledger Fabric blockchain technology can provide the foundation for the described decentralized marketplace where all the market players could participate in the resource allocation and pricing process in a transparent and trustworthy way and without relying on a third party.

Case Study: 5G Network Slicing

Network virtualization technology allows the division of network resources into isolated virtual slices of the network that could be then offered to other users. This creates a new business opportunity for network operators and infrastructure providers to monetize their idle resources. Therefore a new business model has been gaining attention where operators and service providers can trade network resources in a marketplace equipped with a market mechanism(e.g., auctions). The aim is to develop a marketplace that does not rely on a third-party broker to conduct the market.

Why Hyperledger?

Hyperledger Fabric is an open-source project that is built as a modular software so that every piece of it can be tailored into the needs of the developers. Besides, with Hyperledger Fabric, there are no coding language lock-ins as the platform does not force the developer to use a particular language for the smart contracts. Finally, compared to other blockchain frameworks, the supported high transaction throughput and low latency make it a right candidate for 5G use cases.

Scenario:

A number of operators and service providers are participating in a marketplace to buy/sell network slices [2]. They each offer ask/bid prices for the offered quantity of a network slice and the smart contract that has to be endorsed by every single operator decides the final allocation and price of the network slices.

The commodity: A network slice consisting of computing, RAN, and storage resources.
Member organizations: Infrastructure providers, network operators, and service providers.
Technology: Hyperledger Fabric v 1.4.1, Raft ordering service
Architecture: Five organizations each with one peer node and 10 Raft orderers.
The Smart Contract: A sealed-bid double-sided auction mechanism that allows bilateral trade of network slices.

Conclusions:

The research team at Connect Centre [3] have developed the smart contracts and deployed the Hyperledger Fabric network on one of the major public cloud provider’s infrastructure. The results of the performance benchmarks of the blockchain solution are reported in [2]. In addition to the 5G slicing, other resource sharing problems in 5G are expected to benefit from the blockchain technology. One other example is Virtual Network Function (VNF) marketplaces where network operators and software vendors could offer their virtualized network services such as Firewall, DNS, CDN, etc.

[1] Future Networks. “5G-Era Mobile Network Cost Evolution.” Accessed September 10, 2020. https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/wiki/5g-era-mobile-network-cost-evolution/.

[2] N. Afraz. and M. Ruffini, “5G Network Slice Brokering: A Distributed Blockchain-based Market,” in EuCNC conference 2020.

[3] CONNECT – the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Future Networks and Communications, https://connectcentre.ie/

If you’re interested in how blockchain is being used in the telecom industry, get involved with the Hyperledger Telecom Special Interest Group.

About the author
Nima Afraz is a postdoctoral researcher with Connect Centre for Future Networks and Communications, Trinity College Dublin. He is a member of Hyperledger Telecom Special Interest Group. His research interests include network economics, network virtualization and blockchain for telecoms.

Cover image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay