Blockchain in Telecom: An Insight into the Potential Benefits of Combining Blockchain, 5G, IoT, Cloud Computing, and AI/ML in the Telecom Business

By Shibaji Sankar Biswas

‘Blockchain in Telecom’ delves deeper into the Blockchain architecture and its potential benefits of implementation in the telecommunications industry. This book also provides an overview of how blockchain supports 5G, IoT, Cloud, and AI/ML in telecom businesses.

The purpose of this book is to educate readers about the capabilities of Blockchain technology and how it can be used to address several complex issues in the telecommunications industry, including international roaming, inter-carrier settlement, real-time billing, spectrum allocation, managing KYC, and mobile/e-payment solutions in today's business environment. Additionally, novel revenue-generating business models, such as B2B2X, content provider, and underutilized service monetization, are discussed in length throughout this book.

Readers will benefit from reading the chapters as they establish plans for integrating Blockchain technology into the telecoms industry alongside other new technologies such as 5G and IoT, as well as AI/ML, cloud computing, and edge computing. Additionally, this book will help them in managing implementation plans through risk mitigation for implementation and migration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BPB Online LLP
• Release date: Sep 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9789391392307

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

The Case of Blockchain

Introduction

The blockchain technology was introduced by Bitcoin, and given its potential across industries and sectors, it is now a buzzword in the technology world. The blockchain or the distributed ledger technology (DLT) is all about the idea of a decentralized network against the conventional centralized mechanism, and is deemed to have far-reaching implications on sectors and entities that have long relied upon a trusted third-party. A lot of start-ups are innovating new ideas on Robo-advising, digital payment, personal finance management, loan lending, regtech, investment trading, and digital wallet by developing the newly decentralized applications, eliminating the presence of any centralized mediators like the traditional banks.

The main underlying technology which has helped to open this new era of decentralized financial business is Blockchain or DLT, which is now being adopted not only in the fintech sector but also in a wide range of industries. The leaders across a wide range of industries like supply chain, health care, manufacturing, retail, media, and government are firmly grasping the blockchain's transformative potential. Although the blockchain technology has the potential to solve many complex issues, the adoption of it is still very slow in the telecommunication industry. The blockchain technology refers to the technological infrastructure and protocols that allow simultaneous access, validation, and record updating in an immutable manner across a network that is spread across multiple entities or locations.

In the subsequent chapters, we will discuss the transformative potential of the blockchain technology in the telecommunication industry.

Structure

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

Concept of blockchain.

Types of blockchains, industry use cases, and consensus.

Objective

After studying this chapter, you will be able to understand the concept of blockchain framework, including the concept of blockchain transactions, block validation, distributed consensus algorithms, and application and use cases of the blockchain technology.

Concept of Blockchain

Blockchain is a decentralized distributed ledger (data structure), where the data is being stored inside blocks in the form of transactions immutably in a cryptographically secured way.

By definition, Blockchain is a consensus-based, secured decentralized public/private ledger which stores information immutably over a peer-to-peer network.

The first blockchain was conceptualized by Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008.

It proposed a system where two parties transact directly with each other with the following features:

Peer-to-peer payments over an online network.

The elimination of third parties and replacing trust with verification.

Transactions would be irreversible and cannot be manipulated or altered in any manner.

A peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server would generate mathematical proof of the chronological order of transactions.

The system is secure, so long as honest participants collectively control more computing power than the attackers/hackers. Each block in the blockchain contains transactions and block header. The first block in the blockchain is called the Genesis block.

Each block header contains the following information:

A hash value of the previous block:

A hash value is a unique digital fingerprint of a piece of data. A SHA256 hashing algorithm is used for the hash generation. It converts a string of arbitrary length into a 256-bit hexadecimal string. Any change in the string will generate a completely new hash.

Editing any transaction data inside a block by the attackers will generate a completely new hash, but the next block in the blockchain will still contain the old hash. So, the attackers would need to update that block to cover their tracks. However, doing so would change that block's hash, and the next, and so on. It makes the attack impractical due to the requirements of the huge computing power and time. This architectural design makes the entries in the blocks