When Mobile Blockchain Meets Edge Computing

TL;DR

This paper explores integrating blockchain with mobile edge computing to address resource constraints in mobile devices, proposing a novel edge computing approach and demonstrating its effectiveness through a prototype and experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a new concept of edge computing for mobile blockchain and an economic resource management approach, supported by a prototype and experimental validation.

Findings

Edge computing can facilitate blockchain in resource-limited mobile devices.

The proposed system improves efficiency in proof-of-work tasks for mobile blockchain.

Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the mobile edge blockchain system.

Abstract

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.