Edge computing based incentivizing mechanism for mobile blockchain in IOT
This addresses the problem of enabling blockchain applications in resource-constrained mobile IoT environments, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing game-theoretic approaches.
The paper tackles the high computational cost of blockchain mining in mobile IoT devices by proposing an edge computing-based incentivizing mechanism, which uses a two-stage Stackelberg game to optimize rewards and shows higher profit for edge servers compared to an existing scheme under the same total computing power.
Mining in the blockchain requires high computing power to solve the hash puzzle for example proof-of-work puzzle. It takes high cost to achieve the calculation of this problem in devices of IOT, especially the mobile devices of IOT. It consequently restricts the application of blockchain in mobile environment. However, edge computing can be utilized to solve the problem for insufficient computing power of mobile devices in IOT. Edge servers can recruit many mobile devices to contribute computing power together to mining and share the reward of mining with these recruited mobile devices. In this paper, we propose an incentivizing mechanism based on edge computing for mobile blockchain. We design a two-stage Stackelberg Game to jointly optimize the reward of edge servers and recruited mobile devices. The edge server as the leader sets the expected fee for the recruited mobile devices in Stage I. The mobile device as a follower provides its computing power to mine according to the expected fee in Stage. It proves that this game can obtain a uniqueness Nash Equilibrium solution under the same or different expected fee. In the simulation experiment, we obtain a result curve of the profit for the edge server with the different ratio between the computing power from the edge server and mobile devices. In addition, the proposed scheme has been compared with the MDG scheme for the profit of the edge server. The experimental results show that the profit of the proposed scheme is more than that of the MDG scheme under the same total computing power.