Smart Contract-Based Spectrum Sharing Transactions for Multi-Operators Wireless Communication Networks

Multiple-operators (multi-OPs) spectrum sharing mechanism can effectively improve the spectrum utilization in fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication networks. The secondary users are introduced to opportunistically access the licensed spectrum of idle operators (OPs). However, the identity privacy and data security issues raise great concerns about the secure spectrum sharing among multi-OPs. To address these challenges, a permissioned blockchain trust framework is proposed for the spectrum sharing in multi-OPs wireless communication networks in this paper. The Multi-OPs Spectrum Sharing (MOSS) smart contract is designed on the constructed permissioned blockchain to implement the spectrum trading among multi-OPs. Without the need of trustless spectrum broker, the MOSS smart contract enforces multi-OPs to share the spectrum truthfully and designs a punishment mechanism to punish malicious OPs. The MOSS smart contract is tested on the Remix integrated development environment (IDE) and the gas costs of MOSS smart contract is estimated. The performance analysis of the proposed permissioned blockchain trust framework demonstrates that the privacy, openness and fairness of the proposed solution are better than traditional spectrum allocation solutions.