D2D communication assisted edge computing based resource pricing and scheduling research in blockchain

Abstract

Affected by limited computing resources and energy, intelligent terminal devices in edge computing systems cannot perform computationally intensive mining tasks in blockchains based on the PoW (proof-of-work) protocol. Therefore, rational terminal devices, as miners, choose to offload mining tasks to other devices or edge computing servers. Aiming at the problem that lightweight devices cannot complete the blockchain mining tasks, this paper firstly proposes a blockchain mining task offloading strategy based on D2D-EC (Device to Device Communication Assisted Edge Computing). Miners offload mining tasks to CMN (Collaborative Mining Network) integrated by mining devices or edge computing server. Secondly, the mobility of devices increases the risk of failure in the blockchain consensus process. Therefore, we develop a prediction method based on Lagrange interpolation to predict the track of devices. The mobility prediction of devices enable miners to make rational offloading strategy, that is, offload fewer tasks to devices with strong mobility to reduce consensus failure costs. In this paper, the interaction between miners and resource suppliers is modeled as a two-stage multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game to obtain the best resource requests of miners and best pricing of resource suppliers. To find the NE (Nash Equilibrium) of the Stackelberg game, this paper develops a gradient search-based best response distributed algorithm (BRD). Simulation results show that the algorithm can optimize miners’ utilities and suppliers’ profits quickly, and the proposed prediction method can effectively enable miners to optimize allocation of mining tasks.