Distributed Ledger Technologies for Network Slicing: A Survey

Network slicing is one of the fundamental tenets Fifth Generation (5G)/Sixth (6G) networks. Deploying slices requires end-to-end (E2E) control services and underlying resources in a network substrate featuring an increasing number stakeholders. Beyond technical difficulties this entails, there long list administrative negotiations among parties that do not necessarily trust each other, which often costly manual processes, including legal construction neutral entities. In context, Blockchain comes to rescue by bringing its decentralized yet immutable auditable lemdger, has high potential telco arena. sense, it may help automate some above processes. There have been proposals direction are applied various problems different This paper aims at structuring field knowledge by, first, providing introductions blockchain technologies. Then, state-of-the-art presented through global architecture aggregates into coherent whole while showing motivation behind applying smart contracts slicing. And finally, limitations current work, future challenges research directions also presented.