Convergence of Symbiotic Communications and Blockchain for Sustainable and Trustworthy 6G Wireless Networks

Symbiotic communication (SC) is known as a new wireless communication paradigm, similar to the natural ecosystem population, and can enable multiple communication systems to cooperate and mutualize through service exchange and resource sharing. As a result, SC is seen as an important potential technology for future sixth-generation (6G) communications, solving the problem of lack of spectrum resources and energy inefficiency. Symbiotic relationships among communication systems can complement radio resources in 6G. However, the absence of established trust relationships among diverse communication systems presents a formidable hurdle in ensuring efficient and trusted resource and service exchange within SC frameworks. To better realize trusted SC services in 6G, in this article, we propose a solution called a symbiotic blockchain network (SBN) that combines SC and blockchain. Specifically, we first use cognitive backscatter communication to transform blockchain consensus, that is, the symbiotic blockchain consensus (SBC) so that it can be better suited for the wireless network. Then, for SBC, we propose a highly energy-efficient sharding scheme to meet the extremely low power consumption requirements in 6G. Finally, such a blockchain scheme guarantees trusted transactions of communication services in SC. Through ablation experiments, our proposed SBN demonstrates significant efficacy in mitigating energy consumption and reducing processing latency in adversarial networks, which is expected to achieve a sustainable and trusted 6G wireless network.