ATOM : A Decentralized Task Offloading Framework for Mobile Edge Computing through Blockchain and Smart Contracts

Abstract

Edge computing is the paradigm that offers low latency services by bringing computation and data storage closer to data sources. Due to the resource-constrained nature of the edge devices, they may not be able to handle all the computation tasks independently. In such cases, task offloading to the peer edge devices is looked for. However, as the devices are from different manufacturers, collaboration among them is challenging due to the lack of any trusted common platform. Blockchain along with smart contracts can help bridge the gap by providing a common decentralized platform of mutual trust. In this work, we introduce a permissioned blockchain-based platform for decentralized computation task offloading among edge devices. A smart contract is designed which provides an ecosystem of mutual trust by ensuring rewards for the honest participants and punishment for the misbehaving participants. Our proposed scheme also does fractional task offloading to encourage the participation of resource-constrained devices. We evaluated our scheme through a proof of concept implementation over an Ethereum-based testbed and found that our scheme can provide a trust-worthy eco-system for resource-constrained edge devices.