Moose: A Scalable Blockchain Architecture for 5G Enabled IoT with Sharding and Network Slicing

Abstract

5G network slicing enables IoT networks to connect billions of heterogeneous objects providing high quality of service, high network capacity, and enhanced system throughput. Despite all these advantages, there are some major challenges to be addressed including decentralization, transparency, data interoperability, network privacy and security, and network slice orchestration, data provenance, and management. Blockchain technologies have the potential to offer innovative solutions to overcome these challenges. However, in the context of 5G enabled scalable IoT applications, integrating 5G with blockchain platforms could pose challenges to 5G’s goals such as high transaction throughput, high scalability, and real-time transaction processing, sharding-based consensus, network slice management and provenance. In this paper, "Moose," a blockchain platform, to overcome these challenges is proposed. It supports sharding based consensus in the blockchain network. It integrates a network slice orchestration library with smart contracts to manage and schedule network slices. As a use-case, Moose is integrated with a 5G-supported IoT device identity monitoring system on a network sliced environment. The performance results from the implemented system indicate that the proposed system indeed overcomes the aforementioned challenges.