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Edge mining resources allocation among normal and gap blockchains using game theory

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Abstract

Blockchain is a promising technology that may act as a distributed ledger for Internet of Things (IoT). To maintain blockchain and save operation cost, IoT nodes may play roles of miners (who generate or mine blocks), by renting mining rigs from edge computing service providers. During the mining process, miners will receive rewards, while these rewards incentivize miners to keep mining in turn. However, if the rewards are insufficient, there might be a gap time where no miners participate in mining. We call a blockchain without a gap time a normal chain and a gap chain otherwise. This paper is the first to investigate the allocation of edge computing resources when normal and gap chains coexist. In this paper, we propose a normal gap game to model the allocation over the two types of blockchains which was never proposed before. In our game, miners compete with each other to maximize their respective utilities, by determining the per chain shares and the starting time of their mining rigs. We then develop a calculation framework, which factors in various system parameters to quantify the investment and allocation of mining rigs. We finally evaluate the miners’ utilities under different scenarios. This study is very helpful to assist miners for reasonable investment and allocation of edge computing resources.

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Acknowledgements

This work is funded in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (File no. 61872451 and 61872452), in part by the Science and Technology Development Fund, Macau SAR (File no. 0098/2018/A3, 0037/2020/A1 and 0062/2020/A2) and in part by Xiong’An Independently Controllable Blockchain Infrastructure Project (2020). Qinglin Zhao is the corresponding author.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Information Technology, Macau University of Science and Technology, Taipa, 999078, Macau

    Jianwen Yuan, Qinglin Zhao & Jianqing Li

  2. Blockchain Lab, Xiong’An Intelligent City Innovation Federation, Xiong’An, China

    Jun Li

  3. Institute of Data Science, City University of Macau, Taipa, Macau

    Zhiming Cai

  4. Department of Information Management, Yu Da University of Science and Technology, Miaoli, 36143, Taiwan

    Yu-Teng Chang

Authors
  1. Jianwen Yuan
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  2. Qinglin Zhao
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  3. Jianqing Li
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  4. Jun Li
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  5. Zhiming Cai
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  6. Yu-Teng Chang
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Correspondence to Qinglin Zhao.

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Yuan, J., Zhao, Q., Li, J. et al. Edge mining resources allocation among normal and gap blockchains using game theory. J Supercomput 78, 9934–9951 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-021-04249-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-021-04249-7

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