A Blockchain-based Subscriber Data Management Scheme for 6G Mobile Communication System

Xueqiang Yan, Xueli An, Wenxuan Ye, Mingyu Zhao, Jianjun Wu

Abstract: The subscriber data management locates at the heart of the mobile network by providing identity management and granting subscriber access to various network services. The subscriber data is usually stored in the core network, the handling of which shall be compliant with regulatory requirements on data protection. Inspired by the current research on the privacy issues of Internet applications, this work is the first attempt to consider data management from mobile network architecture perspective with the goal of making data processing natively transparent. This work proposes a novel subscriber data management scheme based on the combination of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and Distributed Hash Table (DHT) technologies. Moreover, corresponding procedures are defined to ensure subscriber’s control over personal subscription data (including authentication data) by implementing authentication, authorization and access control in the blockchain platform. To avoid blockchain bloat and privacy issues caused by transparency of blockchain, off-chain data storage architecture is adopted, and is realized in the form of DHT for its expressive features like scalability and look-up speed.