Suitability of Blockchains to Enable and Support Networking Functions: State of Art

The underlying network infrastructure faces challenges from addressing maintenance, security, performance, and scalability to make the network more reliable and stable. Software-defined networking, blockchain, and network function virtualization were proposed and realized to address such issues in both academic and industry wise. This paper analyzes and summarizes works from implementing different categories of blockchains as an element or enabler of network functions to resolve the limitation. Blockchain as a network function has been proposed to give support to the underlying network infrastructure to provide services that have less lag, are more cost-effective, have better performance, guarantee security between participating parties, and protect the privacy of the users. This paper provides a review of recent work that makes use of blockchain to address such networking related challenges and the possible setbacks in the proposal.