Blockchain for Future Wireless Networks: A Decade Survey

The emerging need for high data rate, low latency, and high network capacity encourages wireless networks (WNs) to build intelligent and dynamic services, such as intelligent transportation systems, smart homes, smart cities, industrial automation, etc. However, the WN is impeded by several security threats, such as data manipulation, denial-of-service, injection, man-in-the-middle, session hijacking attacks, etc., that deteriorate the security performance of the aforementioned WN-based intelligent services. Toward this goal, various security solutions, such as cryptography, artificial intelligence (AI), access control, authentication, etc., are proposed by the scientific community around the world; however, they do not have full potential in tackling the aforementioned security issues. Therefore, it necessitates a technology, i.e., a blockchain, that offers decentralization, immutability, transparency, and security to protect the WN from security threats. Motivated by these facts, this paper presents a WNs survey in the context of security and privacy issues with blockchain-based solutions. First, we analyzed the existing research works and highlighted security requirements, security issues in a different generation of WN (4G, 5G, and 6G), and a comparative analysis of existing security solutions. Then, we showcased the influence of blockchain technology and prepared an exhaustive taxonomy for blockchain-enabled security solutions in WN. Further, we also proposed a blockchain and a 6G-based WN architecture to highlight the importance of blockchain technology in WN. Moreover, the proposed architecture is evaluated against different performance metrics, such as scalability, packet loss ratio, and latency. Finally, we discuss various open issues and research challenges for blockchain-based WNs solutions.