6 G Resource Management and Sharing: Blockchain and O‐RAN

The sixth-generation (6G) network must provide performance superior to previous generations to meet the requirements of emerging services and applications, such as multi-gigabit transmission rate, even higher reliability, sub-1 ms latency, and ubiquitous connection for the Internet of Everything ( IoE ). However, with the scarcity of spectrum resources, efficient resource management and sharing are crucial to achieve all these ambitious requirements. Appealing technologies to achieve them are blockchain and the future generation Radio Access Network ( RAN ), and the initiative of making RAN into an open ecosystem carried out by the O-RAN alliance. Because of its inherent properties, blockchain has recently gained an important position, which is of great significance to 6G and other networks. In particular, the integration of blockchain in 6G with O-RAN can enable the network to monitor and manage resource utilization and sharing more efficiently. Hence, in this chapter, we discuss the potentials of blockchain for resource management and sharing in 6G using multiple application scenarios, namely, the Internet of things, device-to-device communications, network slicing, and inter-domain blockchain ecosystems.