An end‐to‐end trusted architecture for network slicing in 5G and beyond networks

Abstract 5G opens the door not only for new network services but also for a new business model involving new business actors. Particularly, the introduction of Network Slicing encourages the appearance of new stakeholders, namely Verticals or network slice tenants, Network Slice Providers, and Resource Providers. The Network Slice Provider sells end‐to‐end network slices (virtual end‐to‐end mobile network) to the Vertical, while leasing virtual and physical resources from Resource Providers to deploy and instantiate these end‐to‐end network slices. Consequently, a trusted relationship among these actors should be established and maintained. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a Blockchain‐based trust architecture that aims to: (1) create and negotiate the deployment of an end‐to‐end slice network; (2) manage automatically the service level agreements (SLA) established between the involved actors; while guaranteeing security and anonymous transactions.