Blockchain Based Service Continuity in Mobile Edge Computing

Abstract

Mobile Edge Computing or MEC enables the provision of computation, storage and network resources within close proximity to the mobile users. MEC can host a set of predefined services or it can dynamically deploy services as requests come from the users. In a typical scenario, mobile users identify the closest MEC node to them and interact with it, however, as they are moving the same service needs to be able to follow them in order to provide service continuity. This problem has been already addressed by phone operators, however, as MEC allows third-party service providers to deploy their applications on top of MEC, new challenges arise. High among them are availability and security. In this paper, we present a blockchain based MEC management with the goal of efficiently guaranteeing service continuity in a secure and timely manner. We propose an architecture and its implementation to validate three main scenarios.