Self-Sovereign Identity and Blockchain Integration for Secure Network Sharing and Federation: Evaluation and Analysis

Abstract

Traditional network sharing and federation models face growing challenges in ensuring secure identity management, interoperability, and trust among multiple network operators. This article presents a secure, decentralized framework that integrates self-sovereign identity (SSI) with blockchain-based consensus mechanisms to address these limitations in multivendor network-sharing environments. The proposed architecture leverages consensus models—such as Proof-of-Work (PoW), Proof-of-Authority (PoA), Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), and Proof-of-Stake (PoS)—to evaluate performance tradeoffs in terms of resource consumption, consensus latency, and scalability. Experimental results show that the PBFT consensus mechanism provides the highest resource efficiency and minimal federation latency overhead when integrating SSI. In contrast, Cosmos PoS offers a balanced tradeoff between scalability, throughput, and moderate resource utilization, making it well-suited for future federated network deployments that require interoperability and high transaction capacity. In addition, threat models along with security and privacy considerations are addressed to ensure compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and to support data sovereignty.