Blockchain-based Network Slice Broker to Facilitate Factory-as-a-Service

Abstract

The novel concept of Factory-as-a-Service~(FaaS) allows the agility of adapting the manufacturing process by identifying the industry's supply chain and user requirements. To cater to FaaS, flexibility in networking and cloud services is a must. 5G network slice broker is a third-party mediator that caters to networking resource demand from clients to the service providers. Thus, this paper introduces a secure blockchain-based network slice broker to facilitate FaaS. The proposed secure network slice broker (SNSB) provides secure, cognitive, and distributed network services for resource allocation and security service level agreement (SSLA) formation with coordination of slice managers and SSLA managers. In SNSB we introduce a federated slice selection algorithm with Stackelberg game model and Reinforcement Learning~(RL) algorithm to compute the real-time and the optimal unit price and demand level. Moreover, we provide an extensive implementation and performance evaluation of SNSB using the Katana slice manager and a custom SSLA manager.