Blockchain and Smart Contracts for Telecommunications: Requirements vs. Cost Analysis

Blockchain technology is being considered a solution to a plethora of problems in networks. These proposals aim to leverage the distributed record-keeping and collaborative decision-making features offered by the blockchain and smart contract technologies to address the emerging area of trust-less ecosystems. However, the state of the art often overlooks deployment considerations such as blockchain infrastructure cost and use case-specific performance requirements and scalability. This paper provides an in-depth perspective into the deployment consideration of blockchain-based solutions for telecommunications networks. This includes deployment cost, infrastructure options, and the choice of a blockchain platform. We study a number of prominent use cases and analyze their required performance and scalability. We furthermore investigate the available deployment options for blockchain solutions and provide insights into each option's pros and cons. Finally, we present a case study proposing a distributed marketplace solution for 5G slice brokering. Experiments are conducted to identify the performance limitations of the proposed solution under various deployment infrastructure.