  Radio Access Networks (RAN) tends to be more distributed in the 5G and
beyond, in order to provide low latency and flexible on-demanding services. In
this paper, Blockchain-enabled Radio Access Networks (BE-RAN) is proposed as a
novel decentralized RAN architecture to facilitate enhanced security and
privacy on identification and authentication. It can offer user-centric
identity management for User Equipment (UE) and RAN elements, and enable mutual
authentication to all entities while enabling on-demand point-to-point
communication with accountable billing service add-on on public network. Also,
a potential operating model with thorough decentralization of RAN is
envisioned. The paper also proposed a distributed privacy-preserving P2P
communication approach, as one of the core use cases for future mobile
networks, is presented as an essential complement to the existing core
network-based security and privacy management. The results show that BE-RAN
significantly improves communication and computation overheads compared to the
existing communication authentication protocols.

Cryptography and Security;Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing;Networking and Internet Architecture