Trustworthy Intent-based 6G Services Marketplaces: A Decentralized Finance Perspective

Abstract

G will enable sophisticated composite services that can be realized, bought, and sold across multi-stakeholder marketplaces. With the advent of intent-based networking, requests for these composite services will be through high-level intents, together with requisite service-level agreements (SLAs), and with significant latitude on the specifics of how the composite services are realized. At the same time, the 6 G ecosystem will be very large, with new stakeholder entrants dynamically joining and leaving. Hence, buyers and sellers will be concerned about the trustworthiness of the sellers and the realized composite services as well as the trustworthiness of buyers and their behaviors. Current approaches to trust in networking are typically based on measures such as reputation, in a manner that will not scale to such large and dynamic ecosystems and does not encourage new entrants to join. We propose an architecture for intent-based 6G multi-stakeholder marketplaces inspired by decentralized finance (DeFi); namely, intent-based cryptocurrency swaps on blockchains/cross-chains. In such DeFi paradigms, trust is implicitly modeled via techno-economic risk management, rather than explicitly computed measures such as reputation. We propose how to leverage such DeFi paradigms to enable trustworthy intent-based multi-stakeholder 6G services marketplaces with SLAs, in a manner that encourages new entrants. Our approach is based on techno-economic risk vs. market-driven rewards as a proxy for trust, realized through intent-based blockchain/crosschain architectures with SLA assurance. Our work provides an enabler for establishing trusted multi-stakeholder interactions with UNEXT, an intelligent networking platform being created by Nokia Bell Labs.