Joint Resource Allocation and Incentive Design for Blockchain-Based Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC), as a promising technology, provides proximate and prompt computing service for mobile users on various applications. With appropriate incentives, profit-driven users can offload multi-task requests across heterogeneous edge servers. However, such incentive trade lacks a trustworthy platform. Due to the decentralized nature of MEC, trading information from players is easily tampered with by edge servers, which poses a threat to cross-server resource allocation. In this paper, we jointly consider incentives and cross-server resource allocation in blockchain-driven MEC, where the blockchain prevents malicious edge servers from tampering with player information by maintaining a continuous tamper-proof ledger database. Particularly, we propose two double auction mechanisms, namely a double auction mechanism based on breakeven (DAMB) and a more efficient breakeven-free double auction mechanism (BFDA), in which users request multi-task service with claimed bids and edge servers cooperate with each other to serve users. A delegated proof of stake (DPoS) based blockchain technology is leveraged to realize decentralized, untampered, safe and fair resource allocation consensus mechanism. The simulation results show that the proposed DAMB and BFDA can significantly improve the system efficiency of MEC.