Towards blockchain-enabled wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Recently, mesh networking and blockchain are two of the hottest technologies in the telecommunications industry. Combining both can reformulate Internet access. While mesh networking makes connecting to the Internet easy and affordable, blockchain on top of mesh networks makes Internet access profitable by enabling bandwidth-sharing for crypto-tokens. Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a blockchain framework implementation and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation. We evaluate HLF in a real production mesh network and in the laboratory. We quantify the performance, bottlenecks and limitations of the current implementation v1.0. We identify the opportunities for improvement to serve the needs of wireless mesh access networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first HLF deployment made in a production wireless mesh network.