Blockchain-Based Wi-Fi Offloading Platform for 5G

Abstract

The advent of 5G has sparked interest in Wi-Fi offloading techniques that enable efficient resource sharing and congestion management of wireless communication spectrum. However, offloading data between multiple networks (i.e. service providers) requires costly inter-provider communication which has a substantial overhead as well as high offloading latency. Moreover, involvement of the profit-oriented decision making of service providers has an inherent weakness of unfair scheduling among users and networks. To overcome those problems, this research work proposes a holistic framework similar to an online data market place where existing infrastructure can be used to set up Wi-Fi zones that everyone can use from their own data plan irrespective of the network operators they belong to. First, our proposed architecture improves the efficacy of offloading by using decentralized nature of the emerging Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to set up an operator-assisted data offloading platform, resulting in efficient inter-provider communication. Second, our proposal strengthens the fair scheduling of offloading resources by using blockchain technology to initiate unbiased and independent decision making. The resulting service is a rating system for the sellers to make reliable transactions for payments.

Survey on blockchain based smart contracts: Applications, opportunities and challenges

“…The use case enabled industrial automation process to autonomously and dynamically acquire the slice required for more efficient operations. Fernando et al [196] proposed a blockchain based wifi offloading platform for 5G. The smart contracts utilized for Wifi service provider rating and offloading decision making.…”

RLbR: A reinforcement learning based V2V routing framework for offloading 5G cellular IoT

“…After adding the environment model, the lifetime of the algorithm is increased by 10.6%. This is because that the environment model saves network energy and balances the FIGURE 5 The experimental results under different vehicle maximum speed energy consumption of each vehicle. In the IAODV algorithm, the vehicle needs to multicast the RREQ message to find a path to the destination vehicle before sending packets.…”

“…After receiving the hello message sent by the neighbour vehicle x, the vehicle s reads the information contained in the message, calculates the cache factor CF x and the energy factor EF x for evaluating the quality of the neighbour vehicle, and then obtains the instantaneous reward, as shown in Equation (5).…”

“…To cope with the unprecedented growth of mobile data, cellular operators are continuously upgrading their networks by either migrating to new generation wireless networks or deploying enhancement techniques on top of 5G cellular network. Several enhancement techniques have been proposed in the literature, such as deploying small base stations using WiFi fusion [3], the radio access technology taking into account the network context [4], and the WiFi offloading technique with a negligible overhead as well as low offloading latency [5].…”

Stackelberg game for heterogeneous traffics management in next‐generation cellular network

“…In [49], the author discusses the issue of high offloading latency during the offloading data between multiple networks. The author proposed a framework called block chain‐based Wi‐Fi offloading.…”