When Mobile Blockchain Meets Edge Computing

By Zehui Xiong, Yang Zhang, Dusist Niyato, Ping Wang, Zhu Han. 2017

481 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Blockchain, as the backbone technology of the current popular Bitcoin digital currency, has become a promising decentralized data management framework. Although blockchain has been widely adopted in many applications (e.g., finance, healthcare, and logistics), its application in mobile services is still limited. This is due to the fact that blockchain users need to solve preset proof-of-work puzzles to add new data (i.e., a block) to the blockchain. Solving the proof of work, however, consumes substantial resources in terms of CPU time and energy, which is not suitable for resource-limited mobile devices. To facilitate blockchain applications in future mobile Internet of Things systems, multiple access mobile edge computing appears to be an auspicious solution to solve the proof-of-work puzzles for mobile users. We first introduce a novel concept of edge computing for mobile blockchain. Then we introduce an economic approach for edge computing resource management. Moreover, a prototype of mobile edge computing enabled blockchain systems is presented with experimental results to justify the proposed concept.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

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Citations in the corpus

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”
Blockchain for 5G and Beyond Networks: A State of the Art Survey (2019, background): “Moreover, to facilitate easy access to data in a distrusted MEC blockchain setting, a decentralized big data repository platform, such as InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) can be necessary for improving storage capability on blockchain [88].”
Blockchain Meets Cloud Computing: A Survey (2020, methodology): “Xiong et al. [161], [162] used a two-stage Stackelberg game to model the pricing process.”
Blockchain for Secure and Efficient Data Sharing in Vehicular Edge Computing and Networks (2019, background): “Blockchain can facilitate establishing a secure, trusted and decentralized intelligent transport ecosystem, to address data sharing problems thus contributing in creating better usage of the transport infrastructures and resources [9], [10], [11].”
Computation Offloading Toward Edge Computing (2019, background): “With the emergence of edge computing, people see the solution of offloading mining tasks to nearby edge infrastructures [211], [212].”
Permissioned Blockchain and Edge Computing Empowered Privacy-Preserving Smart Grid Networks (2019, background): “also [38] have investigated the technical fusion of blockchain and edge computing in a dimension of mobile networks.”
Survey on blockchain based smart contracts: Applications, opportunities and challenges (2021, background): “Smart Contracts in Edge Computing: [148], [149], [150], [151], [152], [153] • Improved perimeter security • Reduced attack risk • High throughput Security risks for data in cloud X X X”
Integrated Blockchain and Edge Computing Systems: A Survey, Some Research Issues and Challenges (2019, background): “Moreover, the resources consumed by blockchain are non-negligible so that the edge computing resource management for the PoW has been studied in [70]–[73].”
System architecture for blockchain based transparency of supply chain social sustainability (2020, background): “Source: [33,34,35] Table 1 compares the blockchain based systems with the existing centralized systems.”
A Survey on Consensus Mechanisms and Mining Strategy Management in Blockchain Networks (2018, methodology): “Therefore, the computation offloading schemes are proposed in these studies by either formulating the problems in a nonlinear/binary programming framework [215] or as a hierarchical game [126], [214].”
A Full Dive Into Realizing the Edge-Enabled Metaverse: Visions, Enabling Technologies, and Challenges (2022, background): “On the other hand, the computational capabilities provided by the network edge enable users in the Metaverse to process data and draw conclusions with lower latency than in the cloud [301].”
Communication-Efficient Edge AI: Algorithms and Systems (2020, methodology): “It also shows promises to adopt the blockchain technique [36]”
Differential Privacy Techniques for Cyber Physical Systems: A Survey (2018, unknown): “, healthcare, finances, and logistics [359]–[361].”
A Survey of Blockchain Technology Applied to Smart Cities: Research Issues and Challenges (2019, unknown): “the edge computing nodes [257].”
Blockchain for Internet of Things: A Survey (2019, methodology): “be solved before MEC can be used in BCoT [63].”