Lightweight, geo-scalable deterministic blockchain design for 5G networks sliced applications with hierarchical CFT/BFT consensus groups, IPFS and novel hardware design

5G network sliced applications enable IoT networks to connect billions of heterogeneous objects, providing high-quality service, network capacity, and enhanced throughput. The blockchain systems which attempt to facilitate 5G network-sliced application requirements present several challenges, such as lack of decentralized governance, reduced transaction throughput/scalability, inability to run on resource-constrained devices, lack of support for real-time/concurrent transaction handling, and non-deterministic Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus models. In this paper, we propose a highly scalable, lightweight blockchain system, “Librum,” for 5G-based network sliced applications. Librum’s lightweight design enables it to run in edge networks, and we have designed low-cost hardware nodes to run the Librum blockchain edge network. The embedded hardware devices contain wifi and cellular modules that allow the Librum blockchain nodes to be run on 5G edge networks. The Librum blockchain, stored on IPFS peer-to-peer decentralized storage, enables any Byzantine node to participate in the network. Librum’s Fungible (ERC20) and Non-Fungible Token (ERC721) smart contracts support concurrent transaction execution with a novel “Validate–Execute” blockchain architecture. We incorporated hierarchical consensus groups to run independent blockchain shards (local consensus groups) on different 5G network slices. The shards can run BFT or CFT (Crash Fault Tolerance) consensus models and reach global consensus via core-blockchain nodes in the network based on connectivity requirements. Core blockchain nodes can also run with BFT (e.g., Tendermint) or CFT (e.g., Proof-of-Authority/Kafka) consensus models, eliminating message-passing overhead and achieving BFT with a deterministic consensus model in Geo-distributed blockchain networks. Dynamic 5G network slice orchestration and data provenance of network slices are implemented with smart contracts. The proposed Librum blockchain is integrated with FreedomeFi and Magma 5G core-based 5G testbed environments.