Abstract:

With the rapid development of mobile communications and continuous network expansion, wireless resources become increasingly scarce. Based on the blockchain, the blockchain radio access network (B-RAN) has recently emerged as a promising architecture for the next generation mobile communication system. Via in-depth merging of blockchain and wireless communication technologies, the B-RAN presents a new paradigm to design future mobile networks. This paper briefly introduces the basic concept and workflow of the B-RAN, and provides several technical solutions for the B-RAN in order to satisfy different scenarios and needs. Furthermore, the security performance of the B-RAN is theoretically analyzed. This paper also designs a dedicated framework of the B-RAN and implements its core modules to test its practical performance. The test results show that the B-RAN has a noteworthy advantage in throughput under the scenario of multiple subnetworks. Compared with other blockchain architectures, the B-RAN has a significantly lower latency of service deployment and is able to achieve the balance dynamically between its security level and service latency.

Key words: blockchain, radio access network, mobile communications, resource aggregation