An Application of DAG-based Distributed Ledger to Manage Content Whereabouts for Beyond 5G Networks

Abstract

This paper presents a framework to manage the content whereabouts in the network consisting of heterogeneous resources by distributed ledger technology. Referring to our previously proposed Piggyback Network, which is an infrastructure-sharing-based large-volume digital content distribution/dissemination platform for the B5G society, we propose a partially ordered directed acyclic graph-based distributed ledger (DAG-DL) as a node-hosted transaction recording method. Through the computer simulations on the propagation delay of transactions over the network, we demonstrate that the proposed DAG-DL can record the past transactions with high censorship resistance, while a conventional blockchain cannot, even over an extremely large number of multiplex pathways and multi-hop relays in a distributed way.