Unlocking the Path toward Intelligent Telecom Marketplaces for Beyond 5G and 6G Networks.

6G systems are perceived to be heavily softwarized, and therefore, the collaboration among all stakeholders, such as network and cloud providers, operators, application developers, service providers and device and equipment vendors, shall occur via software in a secured, distributed, and automated manner. This could be envisioned with a brokerless and immutable marketplace anchored in distributed ledger technologies, removing the need for a trusted party as a marketplace operator while avoiding this single point of failure, increasing transparency and flexibility of operational rules, and featuring automated contract negotiation and fulfillment supporting governance, delivery, and billing operations. This work goes a step forward and introduces a smart resource and service discovery application, based on intent recognition and machine learning assisted techniques, to enable the automated discovery of resources and services exposed over the marketplace. Evaluation results demonstrate the accuracy of our approach and its suitability to provide decentralized telecom marketplaces with intelligent and data-driven discovery capabilities.