Mechanisms for Outsourcing Computation via a Decentralized Market

TL;DR

MODiCuM is a decentralized platform enabling direct outsourcing of computation among edge devices, deterring misbehavior through dispute resolution and fines, with minimal overhead and no need for global trust.

Contribution

It introduces MODiCuM, a novel decentralized system for computation outsourcing that reduces overhead and enforces honest participation without global trust.

Findings

MODiCuM effectively deters misbehavior through dispute resolution.

Experimental results show low computational overhead.

Analytical proofs confirm the system's deterrence capabilities.

Abstract

As the number of personal computing and IoT devices grows rapidly, so does the amount of computational power that is available at the edge. Since many of these devices are often idle, there is a vast amount of computational power that is currently untapped, and which could be used for outsourcing computation. Existing solutions for harnessing this power, such as volunteer computing (e.g., BOINC), are centralized platforms in which a single organization or company can control participation and pricing. By contrast, an open market of computational resources, where resource owners and resource users trade directly with each other, could lead to greater participation and more competitive pricing. To provide an open market, we introduce MODiCuM, a decentralized system for outsourcing computation. MODiCuM deters participants from misbehaving-which is a key problem in decentralized systems-by resolving disputes via dedicated mediators and by imposing enforceable fines. However, unlike other decentralized outsourcing solutions, MODiCuM minimizes computational overhead since it does not require global trust in mediation results. We provide analytical results proving that MODiCuM can deter misbehavior, and we evaluate the overhead of MODiCuM using experimental results based on an implementation of our platform.