Browsing by Author "Xiong, Zehui"
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Item A Hierarchical Game With Strategy Evolution for Mobile Sponsored Content and Service Markets(IEEE Transactions on Communications, 9/24/2018) Wang, Wenbo; Xiong, Zehui; Niyato, Dusit; Wang, Ping; Han, ZhuIn sponsored content and service markets, the content and service providers are able to subsidize their target mobile users through directly paying the mobile network operator to lower the price of the data/service access charged by the network operator to the mobile users. The sponsoring mechanism leads to a surge in mobile data and service demand, which in return compensates for the sponsoring cost and benefits the content/service providers. In this paper, we study the interactions among the three parties in the market, namely, the mobile users, the content/service providers, and the network operator, as a two-level game with multiple Stackelberg (i.e., leader) players. Our study is featured by the consideration of global network effects owning to consumers' grouping. Since the mobile users may have bounded rationality, we model the service-selection process among them as an evolutionary-population follower sub-game. Meanwhile, we model the pricing-then-sponsoring process between the content/service providers and the network operator as a non-cooperative equilibrium searching problem. By investigating the structure of the proposed game, we reveal a few important properties regarding the equilibrium existence and propose a distributed, projection-based algorithm for iterative equilibrium searching. Simulation results validate the convergence of the proposed algorithm and demonstrate how sponsoring helps improve both the providers' profits and the users' experience.Item Cloud/Fog Computing Resource Management and Pricing for Blockchain Networks(IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 9/24/2018) Xiong, Zehui; Feng, Shaohan; Wang, Wenbo; Niyato, Dusit; Wang, Ping; Han, ZhuPublic blockchain networks using proof of work-based consensus protocols are considered a promising platform for decentralized resource management with financial incentive mechanisms. In order to maintain a secured, universal state of the blockchain, proof of work-based consensus protocols financially incentivize the nodes in the network to compete for the privilege of block generation through cryptographic puzzle solving. For rational consensus nodes, i.e., miners with limited local computational resources, offloading the computation load for proof of work to the cloud/fog providers becomes a viable option. In this paper, we study the interaction between the cloud/fog providers and the miners in a proof of work-based blockchain network using a game theoretic approach. In particular, we propose a lightweight infrastructure of the proof of work-based blockchains, where the computation-intensive part of the consensus process is offloaded to the cloud/fog. We formulate the computation resource management in the blockchain consensus process as a two-stage Stackelberg game, where the profit of the cloud/fog provider and the utilities of the individual miners are jointly optimized. In the first stage of the game, the cloud/fog provider sets the price of offered computing resource. In the second stage, the miners decide on the amount of service to purchase accordingly. We apply backward induction to analyze the sub-game perfect equilibria in each stage for both uniform and discriminatory pricing schemes. For uniform pricing where the same price applies to all miners, the uniqueness of the Stackelberg equilibrium is validated by identifying the best response strategies of the miners. For discriminatory pricing where the different prices are applied, the uniqueness of the Stackelberg equilibrium is proved by capitalizing on the variational inequality theory. Further, the real experimental results are employed to justify our proposed model.Item When Mobile Blockchain Meets Edge Computing: Challenges and Applications(IEEE Communications Magazine, 8/14/2018) Xiong, Zehui; Zhang, Yang; Niyato, Dusit; Wang, Ping; Han, ZhuBlockchain, as the backbone technology of the current popular Bitcoin digital currency, has become a promising decentralized data management framework. Although blockchain has been widely adopted in many applications (e.g., finance, healthcare, and logistics), its application in mobile services is still limited. This is due to the fact that blockchain users need to solve preset proof-of-work puzzles to add new data (i.e., a block) to the blockchain. Solving the proof of work, however, consumes substantial resources in terms of CPU time and energy, which is not suitable for resource-limited mobile devices. To facilitate blockchain applications in future mobile Internet of Things systems, multiple access mobile edge computing appears to be an auspicious solution to solve the proof-of-work puzzles for mobile users. We first introduce a novel concept of edge computing for mobile blockchain. Then we introduce an economic approach for edge computing resource management. Moreover, a prototype of mobile edge computing enabled blockchain systems is presented with experimental results to justify the proposed concept.