6GENABLERS-DLT: Empowering 6G Networks with a DLT-anchored Smart Marketplace for Decentralized Telco Resource Trading

10/07/2023

The 6GENABLERS-DLT project is dedicated to addressing the challenges of multi-party collaboration within dynamic 6G environments, where operators and service providers frequently rely on third-party resources to fulfil their contractual obligations. The project aims to offer a comprehensive solution that enables seamless resource sharing among multiple parties, fostering collaboration and innovation.

At the core of the project is the development of a decentralised Marketplace anchored on Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) (i.e., the 6GENABLERS Marketplace), which serves as a collaborative platform for operators, resource and service providers to advertise their offerings to potential consumers. This Marketplace acts as a club where participants can discover, trade, and access resources in a transparent and efficient manner. To allow this, the 6GENABLERS Marketplace operates within a permissioned environment, where participants are authorised to join. Such permissioned nature distinguishes it from public DLT/Blockchain solutions, allowing for greater control, governance, and privacy within the Marketplace, making it well-suited for specific enterprise or consortium use cases in the ICT sector.

The 6GENABLERS Marketplace embraces decentralisation as a core design principle to address the limitations of centralised approaches. By adopting a decentralised architecture, this solution mitigates the risks of a single point of failure and eliminates the need for a trusted party as the central operator. To achieve this, the system will consist of multiple interconnected nodes or instances that work together to form a distributed network, instead of relying on a single centralised instance. The decentralised nature of the Marketplace ensures transparency, trust, redundancy, fault tolerance, and resilience against single points of failure, enhancing the system’s robustness.

The range of resources available within the Marketplace is vast and encompasses various aspects of the 6G network infrastructure. These resources include virtualised mobile core components, Radio Access Network (RAN) assets, edge and cloud infrastructure, as well as vertical applications tailored to specific industry needs. This diverse array of resources caters to the evolving requirements of 6G environments, where flexibility and scalability are of paramount importance. By leveraging the Marketplace, operators and resource/service providers can seamlessly tap into the telco assets offered by different providers, enabling them to meet their operational needs and deliver enhanced services to end consumers.

Through the 6GENABLERS-DLT project, the vision of a highly interconnected and collaborative 6G ecosystem comes to fruition, where stakeholders can harness the collective power of resources to drive the next wave of technological advancements.

Author: Adriana Fernández Fernández, PhD – Senior Researcher, Software Networks, i2CAT Foundation