Blockchain-based Wi-Fi offloading platform for 5G

The advent of 5G has sparked interest in Wi-Fi offloading techniques that enable efficient resource sharing and congestion management of wireless communication spectrum. However, offloading data between multiple networks (i.e. service providers) requires costly inter-provider communication which has a substantial overhead as well as high offloading latency. Moreover, involvement of the profit-oriented decision making of service providers has an inherent weakness of unfair scheduling among users and networks. To overcome those problems, this research work proposes a holistic framework similar to an online data market place where existing infrastructure can be used to set up Wi-Fi zones that everyone can use from their own data plan irrespective of the network operators they belong to. First, our proposed architecture improves the efficacy of offloading by using decentralized nature of the emerging Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to set up an operator-assisted data offloading platform, resulting in efficient inter-provider communication. Second, our proposal strengthens the fair scheduling of offloading resources by using blockchain technology to initiate unbiased and independent decision making. The resulting service is a rating system for the sellers to make reliable transactions for payments.