Received March 18, 2022, accepted April 14, 2022, date of publication May 4, 2022, date of current version May 11, 2022. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3171984 BEAT: Blockchain-Enabled Accountable and Transparent Infrastructure Sharing in 6G and Beyond TOOBA FAISAL 1 , MISCHA DOHLER 1,2 , (Fellow, IEEE), SIMONE MANGIANTE 3 , AND DIEGO R. LOPEZ 4 1 King’s College London, London WC2R 2LS, U.K. 2 Ericsson Inc., Santa Clara, CA 95054, USA 3 Vodafone Research and Development, Newbury RG14 2FN, U.K. 4 Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo - Distrito Telefónica, 28050 Madrid, Spain Corresponding author: Tooba Faisal (tooba.faisal@kcl.ac.uk) ABSTRACT It is widely expected that future networks of 6G and beyond will substantially improve on 5G. Technologies such as Internet of Skills and Industry 4.0 will become stable and viable, as a direct consequence of networks that offer sustained and reliable mobile performance levels. The primary challenges for future technologies are not just low-latency and high-bandwidth. The more critical problem Mobile Service Providers (MSPs) will face will be in balancing the inflated demands of network connections and customers’ trust in the network service. That is, being able to interconnect billions of unique devices while adhering to the agreed terms of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). To meet these targets, it is self-evident that MSPs cannot operate in a solitary environment. They must enable cooperation among themselves in a manner that ensures trust, both between themselves as well as with customers. In this study, we present the BEAT (Blockchain-Enabled Accountable and Transparent) Infrastructure Sharing architecture. BEAT exploits the inherent properties of permissioned type of distributed ledger technology (i.e., permissioned distributed ledgers) to deliver on accountability and transparency metrics whenever infrastructure needs to be shared between providers. We also propose a lightweight method that enables device-level accountability. BEAT has been designed to be deployable directly as only minor software upgrades to network devices such as routers. Our simulations on a resource-limited device show that BEAT adds only a few seconds of overhead processing time – with the latest state-of-the-art network devices, we can reasonably anticipate much lower overheads. INDEX TERMS Infrastructure sharing, smart contracts, permissioned distributed ledgers. I. INTRODUCTION The introduction of 5G has launched the era of low latency and high bandwidth applications; concepts such as the Inter- net of Skills and Industry 4.0 provide us with both a goal and a vision of the future of telecommunications technologies. Indeed, these applications hold the potential to contribute substantially to the prosperity of humankind. For instance, the Internet of Skills can allow for knowledge and expertise developed for the treatment of highly contagious viruses, like the Ebola in [1] to be applied in real-time to the treatment of today’s Covid-19 pandemic. Using robotics, medical staff can treat the covid patients remotely without risking their own lives. Similarly, Industry 4.0 will enable the demands of the growing world population to be met with the production The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Sotirios Goudos . and supply of goods with maximal, and perhaps optimal automation. For the applications such as automated remote surgery, enabled by the Internet of Skills [1], there is the inherent mandate for network stability and guaranteed low latency [2]. These critical requirements are above and beyond those expected of so-called ‘‘non-essential’’ applications, such as listening to music or watching a movie; for which today’s ‘‘best-effort’’ Internet delivery systems suffice admirably. Particularly where human lives are at stake, guaranteed per- formance levels provide a compelling reason for us to engi- neer network systems that can meet these requirements. In this work, we advocate two key directions to increase the network capability and enable scalability in the future networks of 6G and beyond. Firstly, one realistic solution to coping with the growing demand is the Mobile Service Providers’ (MSP) collaboration. Indeed, we have already 48660 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ VOLUME 10, 2022