Blockchain-Assisted Spectrum Trading Between Elastic Virtual Optical Networks

In communication networks, network virtualization can usually provide better capacity utilization and quality of service (QoS) than what can be achieved otherwise. Under this operation, once the capacity of a virtual optical network (VON) is allocated, it will be static for a certain period, for example, a service contract period. However, in reality, the actual traffic demand of a VON always fluctuates, which would lead to a mismatch between the capacity assigned and the actual traffic demand carried. This mismatch would further cause degradation of provisioned network services and inefficiency in assigned network capacity. To overcome this issue, we propose a new scheme, called spectrum trading (ST), to trade spectrum resources between VONs in the context of an elastic optical network (EON). The key idea is to allow different VONs to trade their spectrum resources according to their actual capacity requirement at different time instants. A VON with unused spectra can trade away its unused spectra to other VONs that are short of spectrum resources at that time. in exchange, it is rewarded with some credit for its contribution to the ST community, which it can then use later to obtain extra capacity, if needed. The trust-worthiness of the trading records between the VONs is ensured in a distributed fashion through a blockchain- assisted ledger that is updated whenever a new trade occurs. A software-defined control plane is also developed to enable spectrum trading with the support of the blockchain-assisted ledger. The performance of the ST scheme is evaluated and compared with the scenario without such trading. Results show that the proposed ST scheme is efficient in improving the QoS of each VON and significantly improves overall network capacity utilization.