Blockchain and Smart Contracts for Telecommunications: The Whys and Wherefores

Telecommunications represents a fertile field for blockchain and smart contracts to harvest innovative use cases. The development of 5G and the impending 6G have prompted the research and industry sectors to look into blockchain’s key benefits of decentralization, distribution, trust, immutability, security, and traceability to address some identified challenges or to develop blockchain-based systems that natively inherit from these benefits. In this chapter, we explore the potential paths and research directions where blockchain and smart contracts can be leveraged to serve telecommunications. We start the chapter off by defining telecommunications and the major improvements brought to the sector through the different generations. We then present several areas where blockchain and smart contracts can bring an added value. These areas are: spectrum management, network resource management, business, billing and service level agreements (SLAs), as wellasmobilityandsignaling.Welaterpresenttheraisingmovement ofblockchain-based wireless networks known as “Decentralized Wireless (DeWi).” We also briefly present the main business and regulatory transformations that should follow the migration towards blockchain-based systems in telecommunications. We wrap the chapter with a summary of the main challenges and research directions ahead of the utilization of blockchain and smart contracts to support telecommunications applications.