Blockchain-Based Reputation Management for Task Offloading in Micro-Level Vehicular Fog Network

Abstract

With the widespread adoption of the internet of things (IoT) technologies towards building a smart city, connected devices often offload computation tasks to nearby edge locations (base stations) to reduce overall computation and network delay. However, serving an ever-increasing number of end devices at these traditional edge locations is becoming impossible, subsequently making them fail to deliver the agreed quality of service to all requesting devices. However, the backend cloud data center is available to serve these requests but incurred additional communication delay, thus, unsuitable for delay-sensitive applications. Furthermore, the fact that the underlying network is inherently ad hoc which makes it prone to malicious nodes affecting its overall performance. In this work, we propose a secure fog computing paradigm where roadside units (RSUs) are used to offload tasks to nearby fog vehicles based on repute scores maintained at a distributed blockchain ledger. The experimental results demonstrate a significant performance gain in terms of queuing time, end-to-end delay, and task completion rate when compared to the baseline queuing-based task offloading scheme.