Unprecedented Challenges for China Telecom and China Unicom in building and operating the world’s largest shared 5G SA network have inspired innovations in many aspects. To provide stable and high-speed connections for billion-scale people and more in IOT devices, the two operators have to keep highly consistency and efficiency in daily operation of the co-managed network system and eliminate un-authorized network configurations at nationwide. Besides, the lack of efficient and trustworthy data exchange channels and co-work systems hampers the cooperation efficiency and accuracy.
To address the above challenges, China Telecom,China Unicom and China Tower jointly built the world’s first and largest 5G network operation and scheduling system based on consortium blockchain technology. Using smart contracts to support configuration parameter and operation checking, as well as automatic resource scheduling, the system provides capabilities including joint data management, joint network planning, joint construction and scheduling, joint operation analysis, and joint office.
The underlying blockchain system adopts a novel deployment and collaborative management mechanism, namely Federated BaaS (Blockchain as a Service) system. Unlike one-BaaS for all-party strategy which has safety and authorization problems, it encourages every party to own an independent BaaS to manage its resources and cooperate with other BaaS in a federated manner. Together all the BaaS provide a way to build and operate a blockchain system collaboratively. The protocol designed for BaaS collaboration enlightens novel cooperation patterns and has been formulating a technical standard in China Communications Standards Association (CCSA).
Until now, the system manages over 300 local networks in 31 provincial level administrative divisions in China, including over 1 million 5G and 4G shared base stations respectively. With hundreds of millions of data records shared and verified on blockchain, the digital management of network construction and operation and the joint scheduling of resources have been realized, and the operation efficiency has doubled. Through joint construction and sharing, annually saving around 3 billion USD operation fees and over 10 billion kWH electricity, and reducing carbon emissions more than 6 million tons.
Author£ºChina Telecom¡¢China Unicom¡¢China Tower