Leveraging Smart Contracts for Priority Based Caching in D2D Networks for 5G and Beyond

Abstract

Evolution of the cellular network has created many new capabilities that were previously unavailable in the legacy standards. High throughput and low latency communications are the hallmark of the new 5G-NR standard. Caching at the D2D layer in 5G presents tremendous opportunity for further enhancement of the 5G standard and could be the driving factor behind new set of verticals to be offered and made available over 5G and Beyond 5G (B5G) networks.Smart contracts, applications deployed on a distributed blockchain, similarly provide a huge range of novel opportunities in programming and managing a distributed network system while maintaining security. Since D2D communications are fundamentally limited by their localized communication, a smart contract based approach is presented here to open up the D2D layers in B5G networks to any content provider or network operator participating in the shared blockchain network. In this work, three different priority models are evaluated for performance with respect to caching decisions driven by a genetic algorithm based search for decision optimality. Findings suggest that integration of a priority scheme with a smart contract enforced caching at D2D layer significantly influences the Radio Access Network (RAN) performance in terms of the cost and delay for proposed D2D wireless network.