Efficient Auction Mechanism for Edge Computing Resource Allocation in Mobile Blockchain

Abstract

Blockchain technique has been widely applied in various fields, such as finance, Internet of Things, law, etc. However, it is a challenge to apply blockchain technique for mobile applications, as the mobile devices cannot afford computing resources required by the mining processes. This paper proposes a mechanism based on a combinatorial double auction to offload the mining process of miners to the edge servers. The mechanism is formulated as a resource allocation problem. The corresponding allocation algorithms and payment scheme are proposed to allocate resources and calculate trade prices, respectively. Moreover, this paper proves that the proposed mechanism is efficient in terms of computation, and it satisfies three properties of economic auction which are budget balance, individual rationality and truthfulness. Experimental results show that the proposed mechanism is able to yield higher total utility, together with good scalability. For the case of 900 miners in the auction, the total utility of the proposed mechanism is higher than two existing works by 39.2% and 569.9% on average, respectively.