B-RAN-Based Control Method of User-Equipment Accommodation for Multi-Radio Environment

Wireless traffic is expected to increase mainly due to the demand for high-quality services. One approach to solving this problem is temporarily sharing private base stations (BSs) installed by individuals or companies. A blockchain is considered a key technology for achieving secure sharing of private BSs. In the blockchain-based radio access network (B-RAN), user equipment (UE) and BS owners can make communication contracts using blockchains. The B-RAN enables UEs to temporarily and securely share private BSs autonomously in a multi-radio environment without needing a centralized control station. However, since the selection of an access BS and making a communication contract are autonomously decentralized, the number of UE accommodations in each BS may be biased, and the overall BS-utilization efficiency and fairness of provided downlink throughput may decrease. We propose an autonomous decentralized method for improving the fairness of downlink throughput and overall BS-utilization efficiency by controlling the BS offer price using blockchain ledger information. Simulation results indicate that when determining the access BS for each UE without taking into account the authentication delays, the proposed method improves the median downlink throughput by about 2.2 times, fairness index of downlink throughput by about 7.6 times, and overall BS-utilization efficiency by about 1.2 times that of a conventional method in a multi-radio environment. The proposed method also improves the median downlink throughput by about 2.6 times, fairness index of downlink throughput by about 4.9 times, and overall BS-utilization efficiency by about 1.07 times that of a conventional method in a single-radio environment. This paper also evaluates the case in which authentication delay considerations exist and multiple UEs must be accommodated simultaneously. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed method can also improve downlink throughput regardless of the number of UEs accommodated simultaneously.