The transition to a fully connected world is under way, with the Internet of Senses and digital twins on the horizon. While advanced support in connected intelligence is essential, current technologies and subscription-driven mobile network operator processes face limitations in managing the increasing complexity and scalability. With the support of Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, the SOVEREIGN project will address these challenges. It will enable cyber-physical assets and intelligent endpoints to dynamically adapt and customise their service requirements. Leveraging distributed ledger technologies, SOVEREIGN aims to create a disintermediated, cost-efficient and anonymous Beyond 5G (B5G) communications environment. Its overall goal is to empower intelligent endpoints, offering full control over identities, connectivity, service terms and shared data within the B5G ecosystem.

In order to support the upcoming transition to a fully connected world (e.g., Internet of Senses, digital twins), service advertisement, discovery, negotiation, and management must be more complex and scalable than existing technologies and subscription-driven MNO processes. In Beyond 5G (B5G) networks, cyber-physical assets and intelligent end points will be able to dynamically translate current service requirements into comprehensive technical specifications (e.g., QoS/QoE management per service chunk), as well as request full customization of their service terms based on the current availability of tenants/resources and application requirements. Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) are the key to natively disintermediated, cost-efficient, and anonymous B5G communications, allowing transparency and trust to be established across the integrated DLT, radio access, and core network.

The SOVEREIGN research programme aims to fuel artificial intelligence (AI) with DLT-backed data in order to innovate the B5G service chain and the B5G protocol stack towards the support of fully decentralized, instantaneous, and anonymous resource trading across the B5G network ecosystem (end terminals, infrastructure, OTT service providers, etc.). SOVEREIGN aims to empower intelligent end points in B5G networks, to gain full control of their identities, connectivity, sessions, service terms, and shared data upon accessing B5G spectrum, antennas, network slices and services. To this end, SOVEREIGN will conceptualize and develop a modular end-to-end service architecture integrating DLT-empowered service provisioning, fully decentralized AAA operations, forward-thinking protocols for self-sovereign identity management and anonymity/data privacy preservation as well as user-driven AI-enabled mobility management and traffic steering over joint DLT/B5G system infrastructures.