Authenticated and Prunable Dictionary for Blockchain-Based VNF Management

Network function virtualization is a key enabling technology in future wireless networks for flexible and efficient sharing of network resources. Due to the increasing heterogeneity of network resource providers, a blockchain-based distributed architecture is a promising solution to enable reliable and transparent virtualized network function (VNF) management. However, since on-chain storage and computation are costive, it becomes a challenging task to achieve efficient VNF management with blockchain. In this paper, we first introduce a consortium blockchain for collaborative VNF management among network resource providers. Then, we propose an authenticated VNF dictionary that can be stored as a succinct authenticator on blockchain to support rich VNF query functionalities and efficient verifications of query results. Moreover, we design a dictionary pruning strategy to securely generate a compact authenticator for a given query, which reduces unnecessary memory accesses of the original dictionary when VNF queries are represented as arithmetic circuits. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments with a consortium blockchain network. The experimental results demonstrate that our pruning strategy is efficient for both on-chain and off-chain VNF management.