TUTORIALS

The application of data engineering and blockchain concepts in telecommunication networks is an emerging topic and will continue to gain importance in the coming years. The tutorial will take an in-depth look at the convergence of data engineering and blockchain for B5G/6G networks. The first part will provide background information on data engineering and blockchain, the second part will focus on the application of these technologies to B5G/6G use cases. In the second part, two demos will be demonstrated step by step. Participants of this tutorial will have the opportunity to learn more about data engineering and blockchain for networks and their applications from the perspective of telecom operators.

Madhusanka Liyanage : received the Doctor of Technology degree in communication engineering from the University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland, in 2016. He is an Associate Professor/Ad Astra Fellow and the Director of the Graduate Research, School of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Ireland. He is leading the Network Softwarization and Security Labs, UCD School of Computer Science which mainly focuses on the security and privacy of future mobile networks, including 5G and 6G. He is also acting as a Docent/Adjunct Professor with the Center for Wireless Communications, University of Oulu and a Honorary Adjunct Professor with the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka, and the University of Sri Jayawardhanepura, Sri Lanka. His research interests are 5G/6G, blockchain, network security, AI, explainable AI, federated learning, network slicing, Internet of Things, and multiaccess edge computing.

Zeydan Engin : received the PhD degree in February 2011 from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, USA. Since November 2018, he has been with the Communication Networks Division of the CTTC working as a Senior Researcher. He is currently the Project Coordinator of the Horizon Europe UNITY-6G European Project (January 2025-December 2027). He was the Project Coordinator of the Horizon 2020 MonB5G European Project (November 2021-April 2023). He was a part-time instructor at Electrical and Electronics Engineering department of Ozyegin University Istanbul, Turkey between January 2015 and June 2018. His research areas include data engineering/science for telecommunication networks and network security.

Distributed Ledgers are systems composed of a number of nodes that replicate the same state across a network. Blockchains are a specific kind of Distributed Ledger that maintain the consistency of the replicated state via relating its evolution to the evaluation of a sequence of agreed-upon blocks of transactions.

Distributed Systems based on Distributed Ledger Technologies such as Blockchain Systems are complex by nature and their behavior depends on a wide range of parameters found at different levels of abstraction. As an example, the ordering of transactions in a Blockchain may depend, at the same time, on application layer notions such as gas cost or other incentives, lower level protocol-dependent properties and configurations (e.g., leader selection, gossip etc.), or network level considerations. Moreover, these systems are intended to be used in open networks, with few security guarantees. For instance, Byzantine Fault Tolerant algorithms are intended to uphold certain properties even if up to one third of the participants are faulty or malicious.

The complexity induced by the number of parameters to consider and by the potential presence of malicious behaviors renders the verification of such systems complex. Formal verification may not scale. Testing requires having an implemented system. It also requires extensive mockups of the network environment, potential user behavior and adversarial behavior. Moreover, the complexity of all the implementation details need to be handled when interacting with the mockup environment. Simulation is a pertinent alternative in certain cases. It allows for rapid prototyping of systems in a simplified environment in which we already have all the tools to monitor the system. Moreover, it may allow a fine control over the network conditions as well as user and adversarial behavior.

In this tutorial, we provide a step-by-step guide to simulating Distributed Ledger systems with MAX. MAX is an agent-based simulator dedicated to simulating distributed protocols such as consensus algorithms, reliable broadcasts or blockchain systems. We consider a DAG-based distributed ledger as an example use case. Throughout the tutorial, we highlight the importance of considering the order with which communications occur and how this order might be affected by the non-determinism of the underlying network or by a malicious adversary. In particular, we will discuss the notion of order fairness and how this particular type of fairness might be monitored.

Erwan Mahe : After an engineering degree in Centrale Paris, Erwan Mahe received a PhD in computer science from Université Paris-Saclay in 2021. He is now a permanent researcher at CEA-List. His research interests include model-based testing, runtime verification and simulation of distributed systems. In particular, he is the current maintainer of the MAX Multi-Agent Simulation tool which is used to simulate and analyse distributed ledgers and the underlying consensus algorithms.