The combination of blockchain and 5G technology
Harbin Engineering University Blockchain Technology Course School of Computer Science
2019065212 Liu Yaqi 2019065220 Wang Xi
- Development History
As early as 2016, the U.S. government began to allocate radio frequencies for 5G networks and conducted early trials of 5G in four cities. In 2018, South Korea used the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics to achieve its 5G debut. Through the 5G network services provided by companies in all links of the 5G industry chain, it became the world's first large-scale quasi-commercial service of 5G.
In the United States, in mid-2016, the U.S. government allocated radio frequencies for 5G networks, and four cities conducted preliminary trials; in 2017, Verizon announced the deployment of 5G commercial wireless networks and 5G core networks in the second half of 2017. The European Union reached a preliminary agreement in July 2017; the 5G development roadmap was established in 2018, and 5G is expected to be launched in European cities by 2025. Operators in Japan will start the commercial use of 5G in some areas such as the center of Tokyo; Japan's three major mobile operators NTT, DoCoMo, KDDI and Softbank plan to start 5G services in some areas in 2020. In April 2017, Korea Telecom (KT), South Korea's second largest telecommunications company, announced the deployment and optimization plan of the 5G test network with its partners; in the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, South Korea achieved the first 5G show, becoming the world's first large-scale 5G network. quasi-commercial services.
The 2017 Chinese government work report pointed out: "Comprehensively implement the development plan of strategic emerging industries, accelerate the research and development and transformation of new materials, artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, biopharmaceuticals, fifth-generation mobile communications and other technologies, and make industrial clusters bigger and stronger." This is the first time that the fifth-generation mobile communication technology (5G) has been mentioned in the government work report. In November, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology officially released the 5G system frequency use plan, using the 3.5GlEz and 4.8GIEz frequency bands as the main frequency bands for the deployment of my country's 5G system. On March 2, 2018, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology proposed to further accelerate the planning progress of the 5G system spectrum. In addition to the mid-band indicators, it also required technical indicators for millimeter waves, the Internet of Things, the Industrial Internet, and the Internet of Vehicles.
As a distributed system (or a "distributed ledger"), the blockchain has a P2P network architecture, and the information recorded on the network has the characteristics of being irreversible, so it has long-term potential in the supply chain, medical and other fields. Expansion capacity. However, the application of blockchain in the above fields requires the deployment of IoT devices of a certain scale. At this stage, the procurement and deployment costs of IoT devices are still relatively high, which limits the realization space of the blockchain industry in market segments. In addition, for industrial, unmanned aerial vehicles, smart cities and other large-scale and extensive application scenarios that require the Internet of Things, it is limited by the lack of unified technical standards and implementation plans, as well as the huge number of Internet of Things devices and the simple structure of individual components. Information security issues such as being easy to be cracked, planned and modified, and stolen have not been popularized.
2. Blockchain advantages
Blockchain is the underlying technology of digital encryption currency represented by Bitcoin. It integrates computer technologies such as distributed data storage, point-to-point transmission, consensus mechanism, and encryption algorithm. It is considered to be another subversive innovation in the Internet era. Blockchain Because of its huge breakthroughs in data storage and information transmission, it is likely to fundamentally change the existing economic and financial operating models.
The integration of blockchain and 5G can redefine the era of digital economy. Blockchain can be seen as a key enabler in securing 5G networks.
First, solve the single point of failure: In scenarios such as communication resource sharing, using a decentralized service architecture will eliminate the bottleneck problem, thereby effectively enhancing the quality of service delivery; second, the issue of digital rights: by the end of 2020, mobile Data traffic is expected to grow by 46%. The advent of the 5G era will further increase the amount of data exponentially. Blockchain provides infrastructure support for data rights confirmation in the 5G era; third, traceability issues: In scenarios such as service sharing and settlement, shared data, resource usage and other information will not be tampered with and can be traced after being uploaded to the chain. Reduce service disputes; Fourth, safety issues. The combination of blockchain and 5G can enhance the privacy mechanism by providing a distributed trust model; Fifth, multi-party collaboration: In the 5G era, operators need to completely transform the back-end system to manage more complex networks composed of more participants and networks. 5G ecosystem. Today's systems are simply not suited to handle this. In this way, blockchain is becoming the new cornerstone for operators to effectively manage their 5G ecosystems. It does this through efficient, secure, scalable and transparent processes, and supports the multi-stakeholder collaboration that is critical to the future success of 5G.
3. Status quo of industry development
As a new generation of mobile communication technology, 5G has an order of magnitude improvement over previous mobile communication technologies in terms of peak speed, user rate, air interface delay, mobility, connection density, traffic capacity, and frequency efficiency. The new features of 5G can be used to support new mobile communications, industrial Internet services, and the Internet of Everything. seamless interaction. Blockchain technology has grown into an enabling, disruptive and transformational technology and is beginning to be adopted across many industry verticals. In the 5G era, the blockchain will mainly play a huge role in the following aspects: trusted management, secure interaction, and efficient collaboration between multiple parties and massive devices.
Blockchain has potential market application opportunities in the development of 5G, including. 5G infrastructure crowdsourcing: through the sharing of benefits, the introduction of social capital, and the way of resource investment, bidding and investment cooperation; 5G infrastructure sharing: 5G sharing, mainly refers to the seller's mobile network operator (MNO) through network virtualization, Abstract and divide physical and radio infrastructure resources into different virtual resources and provide them. Each virtual resource has its own distinct functions, services, and goals. Blockchain can help achieve more efficient and secure 5G resource sharing and usage traceability. Using smart contracts, decentralized protocol sharing and payments can be automated. International roaming: In this scenario, blockchain-based distributed roaming network access and authentication can be used in the future to efficiently and securely share user information of different network operators on the blockchain network to realize wireless roaming services. Easy and seamless access without the intervention of any central entity. Authorization and authentication, as well as automatic billing and payment can be completed based on smart contracts. Network slicing: In 5G, network slicing is defined as the instantiation of physical infrastructure or underlying network services and functions. In the future, blockchain technology could be used to replace some or all of the NSB functions. According to predefined rules, smart contracts can be implemented to allow different requesters to negotiate various service contract terms autonomously and dynamically. In addition, operators can also register and publish network slicing functions in the blockchain, and realize automatic billing and settlement; IoT device management and authentication: in 5G, the connection delay of millions of IoT devices is expected to be less than 1 millisecond . The combination of such a large number of IoT devices opens up possibilities for new business models and services for future mobile users. Blockchain-based decentralized management solutions will have higher trust, visibility, and traceability, and can also realize automated payments.
4. Mainstream products
5GT: A new application landing scenario of blockchain + 5G. 5GT is a comprehensive digital application ecological platform based on "blockchain + 5G". It is building an all-round, multi-field digital public chain including digital assets, digital transactions, 5G integration, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. . Through a professional technical team, 5GT takes the security, efficiency, capacity, and processing capacity of the public chain as the starting point, and combines the "blockchain + 5G" technical concept to make millions of transactions per second possible and improve digital intelligence. Business development efficiency helps the prosperity and development of the blockchain industry ecology.
5GT is well aware that in order to fully unleash the potential of 5G, it is necessary to integrate technology, which is also the key to 5G as a catalyst to empower various vertical industries. Thanks to the high-intensity interconnection between devices, malicious devices may cause confusion in the network. With the promotion of 5G networks, transactions and payments between these devices will explode. At that point, the current financial infrastructure will become vulnerable. The blockchain can help 5G to solve the two obstacles of security and scalability. 5GT will take advantage of the non-tamperable characteristics and consensus mechanism of the blockchain, and give full play to the characteristics of the blockchain such as data retrospective audit, data authenticity, rapid response, member management on the chain, asset digitization and process intelligence, etc., to provide security for the Internet of Things. Assure. Smart contracts provide a reliable underlying protocol for each application and transaction.
As a basic public chain facing the 5G digital economy era and focusing on 5G application scenarios, 5GT aims to use blockchain technology to realize complex application scenario business on-chain, and help the industrial development in the 5G digital era. After the main network is launched, 5GT will be widely used in the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, industrial control, smart city, smart manufacturing, edge computing modules and other application fields in the 5G environment. 5GT believes in the development of blockchain and digital solutions in the 5G era. I hope more people will learn about the blockchain with us, join the blockchain, and help the development of the 5G era and blockchain technology together!
5. Development Forecast
In order to meet the various expectations in the 5G standard, there are still many technical, mechanism, and business model issues that need to be explored and resolved. The challenges facing the integration of blockchain and 5G include: First, the legality of smart contracts: the legal status of smart contracts usually depends on whether there are binding contracts and legal documents associated with them. A clear regulatory framework needs to be developed for the definition, implementation, and management of smart contract-based agreements; second, the security of smart contracts: smart contract code may also contain vulnerabilities. Developing secure, bug-free 5G smart contract code has become a mission-critical task. Also, by design, smart contracts are not patchable or upgradeable. Therefore, 5G smart contracts need to formulate standardized solutions for bug fixes and updates; third, scalability: the scalability of blockchain technology needs to be improved to support the service volume in the era of the Internet of Everything. Security also needs to be further improved. The target end-to-end latency of 5G networks is less than 1 millisecond. This stringent requirement requires configuring and setting up transactions at very high throughput rates. At present, blockchain public chain networks, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, can process 10-14 transactions per second, and some private chain implementations can reach 3,000 to 20,000 TPS; fourth, interoperability: At present, there are many types of Blockchain platforms are available, and seamless cross-chain interoperability between different blockchain platforms is a challenging problem.
The combination of blockchain, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and 5G technology is expected to promote the development of smart cities, digital society, and asset chaining. Blockchain technology can confirm the rights of real physical assets. Through technologies such as smart contracts, the certified physical assets can be transferred more flexibly and freely on the chain, enriching the market level and fully stimulating productivity. The Internet of Things technology represented by 5G and NB-1oT will break through the limitations of the existing Internet of Things and be widely used in various fields such as logistics, agriculture, and automation management, bringing huge innovative advantages in terms of production efficiency, cost, and security. Artificial intelligence technology will make industrial production and asset transfer more efficient, and resources will be allocated with better quality. 5G technology, as the infrastructure of the above technologies, enables more efficient and reliable connections between people and people, people and things, and things and things under high-speed data transmission.
First of all, in the field of Internet of Things, 5G's Internet of Everything can realize real-time and fast transmission of hardware data, and blockchain technology can also provide decentralized solutions for large-scale collaboration between devices in the Internet of Things. Similarly, the high transmission rate of 5G technology and the immutable, secure, traceable, and zero-knowledge proof features of blockchain also play an important role in the fields of big data and artificial intelligence, Internet of Vehicles, driverless driving, industrial control, and smart cities. Whether it is the Internet of Vehicles, smart home or smart city, 5G can accelerate the connection between terminals, thereby promoting the implementation of large-scale applications, but the key is to think about "whether the hardware can be distributed through blockchain technology?" The difficulty lies in the difference in computing performance, network performance and blockchain protocol implementation on the development platform brought about by the diversity of IoT devices. It is understood that the blockchain Internet of Things project UOTC (UOTC) has made use of 5G technology to lay out in advance. In addition to creating a new consensus protocol (UxBFT) for the Internet of Things, it also aims at the UDP protocol required by NB-IoT for the blockchain protocol. A transformation has been carried out to realize the cross-border traceability of traceability and tracking equipment. Secondly, for application scenarios that need to transmit large-flow video and image data, such as VR/AR, games and other entertainment fields, the high-speed transmission characteristics brought by 5G eMBB can support application scenarios that require large-flow video and image data transmission landing. Thirdly, the provision of basic services by blockchain for 5G is also a new combination of ideas. For example, DNet, which uses blockchain technology to build a decentralized network infrastructure, mobilizes users to build electronic products around them into micro base stations that can be transmitted. While helping operators build micro base stations to reduce operator costs, each participant All users can become the entrance of the blockchain. Realize the user's idle traffic through blockchain smart contracts, help operators extensively build 5G-related infrastructure, and promote the rapid landing and development of 5G. The real implementation in the future is closely related to the development of 5G, and it will also test the ability to control the resources of service providers.