Make Rental Reliable: Blockchain-Based Network Slice Management Framework with SLA Guarantee

To provide customized and high-quality network services under limited network resources, the 5G introduces the network slicing technology that divides physical networks into several logically independent virtual networks, improving the performance of network utilization. The slice management should satisfy the chief concerns of network operators and slice tenants who are the two most important participants, i.e., slice allocation for operators and Service Level Agreement (SLA) guarantee for tenants. However, for slice allocation, traditional centralized schemes cannot well support multi-operator slicing due to the lack of trust. And for SLA guarantee, existing solutions only provide global SLA based on game theory but cannot handle each dispute between operators and tenants. To solve the problems, we propose a blockchain-based network slice management framework consisting of a slice committee and three protocols: slice, audit, and dispute. With the help of the decentralization and reliability of blockchain, the proposed scheme achieves collaborative slice management among multiple operators with SLA guarantee. Through security and performance analysis, we prove that the proposed scheme can defend against possible dishonest behaviors of entities in the system, and is practical in terms of performance.