Applying Blockchain Consensus Mechanisms to Network Service Federation: Analysis and Performance Evaluation

Cutting edge (vertical) applications may swiftly saturate service providers’ virtualized infrastructure. In 5G and beyond, service providers seek out for innovative solutions such as Network Service Federation (NSF) which allows orchestration of external domain services/resources to provide a zero-downtime end-to-end vertical service. Distributed ledger technologies, such as Blockchain, are used to enhance the federation process. In this article, we propose and evaluate the application of Blockchain technology for NSF. We evaluate four different consensus mechanisms: Proof-of-Work (PoW), Proof-of-Authority (PoA), Practical Byzantine-Fault Tolerant (PBFT), and Proof-of-Stake (PoS). The experimental evaluation is executed using Ethereum, Tendermint and Cosmos platforms. Results show that the evaluated consensus mechanisms enable the use of NSF for both latency-sensitive and security stringent vertical applications.