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Mobile edge computing-enabled blockchain: contract-guided computation offloading

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Abstract

The core problem of blockchain is to solve the proof-of-work puzzle, which is a high energy-consumption task. To address the resource limit problem, the combination of blockchain and mobile edge computing (MEC) has attracted widespread concern. In this paper, we consider a resource trading problem for a MEC-enabled blockchain system with multiple miners and one edge computing service provider (ESP), in which ESP has no previous knowledge of miners’ private information. We focus on how to perform resource trading between miners and ESP to maximize ESP’s profit under incomplete information? To tackle this problem, the resource trading process is modeled as a monopoly market using contract theory. The ESP acts as a monopolist and needs to set a contract containing service time and price for the miners. The miners can be classified into multiple types based on the private information and select one contract item designed for its type. We first analyze the necessary and sufficient conditions for feasible contracts and derive the optimal contract that maximizes the ESP’s profit for complete information scenario. For incomplete information, the service demand and the number of transactions contained in the block are the private information of miners and not known by ESP, we explore the properties of a feasible contract to reduce the complexity and propose a Lagrange multiplier algorithm to obtain the optimal contract in this scenario. Finally, the feasibility and optimality of the contract have been shown through simulation results. In addition, our proposed method can achieve results close to that of complete information scenario and has a maximum performance improvement of 17.19% comparing with linear pricing strategy in incomplete information scenario.

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All data, models, or code generated or used during the study are available from the corresponding author by request.

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Funding

This work is supported by the Nature Science Foundation of Fujian Province (Grant No.2021J011002, No.2021J011004, No.2020J01813), and the Humanities and Social Science Foundation of Ministry of Education (Grant No.20YJC870002).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Sciences, Minnan Normal University, Zhangzhou, 363000, Fujian, China

    Yijun Li, Ziqiong Lin, Wenjie Zhang, Yifeng Zheng & Jingmin Yang

  2. Key Laboratory of Data Science and Intelligence Application, Fujian Province University, Zhangzhou, 363000, Fujian, China

    Yijun Li, Ziqiong Lin, Wenjie Zhang & Yifeng Zheng

  3. Department of Electronic Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei, 106335, Taiwan

    Jingmin Yang

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  1. Yijun Li
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Contributions

YL wrote fifty percentage of the manuscript, performed mathematical modeling design and construction, and also conducted part of the experiment. ZL contributed to the conception of the study and wrote fifty percentage of the manuscript. WZ contributed significantly to analysis and algorithms design. YZ performed the data analyses and English grammar checking. JY helped perform the analysis with constructive discussions and improved the English grammar and checked spelling.

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Correspondence to Ziqiong Lin.

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The authors declared that they have no competing interests to this work. We declare that we do not have any commercial or associative interest that represents a conflict of interest in connection with the work submitted.

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Ziqiong Lin, Wenjie Zhang, Yifeng Zheng and Jingmin Yang have contributed equally to this work.

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Li, Y., Lin, Z., Zhang, W. et al. Mobile edge computing-enabled blockchain: contract-guided computation offloading. J Supercomput 79, 7970–7996 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-022-04990-7

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