Blockchain-Based Collaboration Design for 6G Distributed Networks

The collaboration across various usage scenarios in 6G distributed networks presents new challenges, including the need for instantaneous access, heterogeneous collaboration, and robust security and trustworthiness. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a universal blockchain-based collaboration architecture, along with an end-to-end collaboration mechanism designed to ensure efficient, secure, and trustworthy resource-sharing capabilities. However, due to the inherent limitations of blockchain technology regarding throughput and storage, it cannot be directly applied to the proposed architecture without adaptive enhancements. To address the throughput limitation, this paper introduces a service-based, capacity-adaptive blockchain sharding framework. In this framework, nodes with varying consensus efficiencies are partitioned into different shards based on a reputation-based capability assessment strategy. Transactions associated with different service types are then allocated to the corresponding shards, ensuring that each shard’s consensus capability aligns with the service’s requirements. Furthermore, to mitigate the load’s impact on consensus efficiency, a load-sensitive Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus mechanism is proposed for each shard. To address the storage limitation, this paper introduces a hybrid storage policy that combines both on-chain and off-chain solutions, effectively alleviating blockchain storage constraints. Simulation results demonstrate the feasibility and superiority of the proposed architecture and mechanisms, confirming their potential for enabling effective collaboration in 6G distributed networks.