Abstract
Sixth generation (6G) network is a revolutionary technology to satisfy the ever-growing demands from the sustainable development of emerging industrial applications and services. Due to its high flexibility, convenient and rapid deployment, self-organization capability, and outstanding expansibility, network-in-box (NIB) represents a promising approach for future networks. The integration of NIB with 6G can lead to many new applications in geoscience, robotics, and industrial automation. For 6G-enabled NIB, services are deployed directly on the NIB, which increases the fault tolerance and reduces the traffic volume on the backhaul link. As more and more data are processed and shared in industrial applications and services, the security of data aggregation becomes a key challenge for 6G-enabled NIB. To address this challenge, in this article, we propose a blockchain based privacy-aware distributed collection (BPDC) oriented strategy for data aggregation. In BPDC, an improved blockchain with a new block header structure and two different block generation rules are designed and introduced, which restricts the task receivers to search and receive the tasks beyond their levels of security permission. While guaranteeing the data aggregation performance, BPDC can also achieve privacy protection by decomposing sensitive tasks and task receivers into multiple groups. Validation experiments show that the BPDC accomplishes low overhead, high throughput, and privacy preservation in various industrial applications.