BE-RAN: Blockchain-enabled Open RAN with Decentralized Identity Management and Privacy-Preserving Communication

Radio Access Networks (RAN) tends to be more distributed in the 5G new radio in order to provide low latency and flexible on-demanding services. In this paper, Blockchain-enabled Radio Access Networks (BE-RAN) is proposed as a novel decentralized RAN architecture to facilitate enhanced security and privacy on identification and authentication. It can offer user-centric identity management for User Equipment (UE) and Radio Access Networks (RAN) elements and mutual authentication to all entities while enabling on-demand point-to-point communication with accountable billing service add-on to the general public. Also, a potential operating model with thorough decentralization of RAN is envisioned. The distributed privacy-preserving P2P communication, as one of the core use cases for future mobile networks, is presented as an essential complement to the existing core network-based security and privacy management. The results show that BE-RAN significantly improves communication and computation overheads compared to the existing communication authentication protocols.