Integrated Blockchain and Edge Computing Systems: A Survey, Some Research Issues and Challenges

By Ruizhe Yang, F. Yu, Pengbo Si, Zhaoxin Yang, Yanhua Zhang. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 2019

577 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Blockchain, as the underlying technology of crypto-currencies, has attracted significant attention. It has been adopted in numerous applications, such as smart grid and Internet-of-Things. However, there is a significant scalability barrier for blockchain, which limits its ability to support services with frequent transactions. On the other side, edge computing is introduced to extend the cloud resources and services to be distributed at the edge of the network, but currently faces challenges in its decentralized management and security. The integration of blockchain and edge computing into one system can enable reliable access and control of the network, storage, and computation distributed at the edges, hence providing a large scale of network servers, data storage, and validity computation near the end in a secure manner. Despite the prospect of integrated blockchain and edge computing systems, its scalability enhancement, self organization, functions integration, resource management, and new security issues remain to be addressed before widespread deployment. In this survey, we investigate some of the work that has been done to enable the integrated blockchain and edge computing system and discuss the research challenges. We identify several vital aspects of the integration of blockchain and edge computing: motivations, frameworks, enabling functionalities, and challenges. Finally, some broader perspectives are explored.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0b7a10138d8037d28dff301e207ff92f61554c2a

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Citations in the corpus

Enabling Massive IoT Toward 6G: A Comprehensive Survey (2021, background): “In 5G, a number of works studied the convergence of communication, caching, and computing in the case of edge computing [33], which can be used for data transmission, storage, and processing.”
Edge Computing in 5G: A Review (2019, background): “In addition, the scalability and modularity nature, as well as the capabilities, of edge computing can facilitate the deployment of block chain [64] among UEs with limited capabilities.”
A Full Dive Into Realizing the Edge-Enabled Metaverse: Visions, Enabling Technologies, and Challenges (2022, background): “Each shard of the Metaverse contains its independent state and transaction history, and certain nodes will only process transactions in certain slices, increasing the transaction throughput and scalability of the blockchain [52].”
Blockchain for 5G and Beyond Networks: A State of the Art Survey (2019, background): “Many research works on blockchain [11], [12], [13] demonstrate that the blockchain adoption is beneficial to spectrum 5G management in terms of better verification of spectrum access with blockchain contracts, improved accessibility thanks to the transparency of blockchain.”
Edge Computing with Artificial Intelligence: A Machine Learning Perspective (2022, background): “EC’s general architecture is three-layered, as shown in Figure 2, which are end, edge, and cloud [29].”
Blockchain for the Internet of Vehicles Towards Intelligent Transportation Systems: A Survey (2020, background): “CPS applications [69]–[74], IoV applications [75]–[78], and blockchain [79]–[82], to support a massive number of smart devices by running computational-intensive tasks and storage”
Edge-Computing-Enabled Smart Cities: A Comprehensive Survey (2019, unknown): “However, blockchain suffered from the scalability barrier with an increase in the number of transactions [185].”
A Survey on the Convergence of Edge Computing and AI for UAVs: Opportunities and Challenges (2022, background): “The goal of such an architecture is to perform the delay-sensitive and computationally intensive part of an application in the edge network, while some applications in the edge server may communicate with the core cloud for the purpose of data synchronization [21].”
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Federated Learning Meets Blockchain in Edge Computing: Opportunities and Challenges (2021, background): “The key research challenges and future directions are highlighted in Section VI. Finally, Section VII concludes the article.”
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A Survey on Blockchain for Big Data: Approaches, Opportunities, and Future Directions (2020, unknown): “The integration of blockchain with edge computing and 5G systems were studied in [20] and [21], respectively.”
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