Leveraging Blockchain for Isolation Enhancement of Network Slices

The fifth-generation network (5G) can support diverse service requirements via Network Slicing (NS). NS decouples the physical network infrastructure into multiple logically isolated networks enabled via Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). Firstly, this paper proposes a blockchain-enabled network slice (BcNS) to bridge the gap between slice isolation and resource sharing. Secondly, with the aim of minimizing the deployment cost, we formulate a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model to minimize the cost of network slice deployment as the optimization goal. Experimental platform is established to verify the feasibility of the designed implementation. The results show that the architecture achieves performance isolation, security isolation, and reliability isolation between different network slices.