Blockchain Based Offloading Strategy: Incentive, Effectiveness and Security

To securely integrate Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) into Wireless Blockchain Network (WBN), this paper proposes a framework for blockchain based offloading strategy, where blockchain nodes are categorized as blockchain users and blockchain miners from a motivation perspective. Particularly, aiming at improving the motivation ability, a block generation process is first designed for blockchain miners’ short transaction processing time lower bound. Then, to further maximize the utilities of both blockchain users and blockchain miners, an optimization problem is formulated to determine an optimal strategy which involves a trade-off between the fast transaction confirmation rate required by blockchain users and the transaction fees obtained by blockchain miners. A Stackelberg game is introduced to model the interaction between the blockchain users and miners. Meanwhile, a distributed algorithm is designed to converge this strategy in an iterative manner based on the buyer-seller negotiation. Additionally, double-spending attack and selfish mining attack are analysed to examine their impact on the system performance in terms of confirmation delay and throughput while guaranteeing the high security level. Finally, extensive experiments have been conducted to show the rightness and effectiveness of the proposed equilibrium-based strategy and mathematical analysis, and some insights are discussed for the further guide as well.