When Mobile Blockchain Meets Edge Computing: Challenges and Applications

Date

8/14/2018

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

IEEE Communications Magazine

Abstract

Blockchain, 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.

Description

Keywords

Edge computing, Cloud computing, Data mining, Bitcoin, Servers, Heterogeneous networks, Internet of Things, Multiaccess communication

Citation

Copyright 2018 IEEE Communications Magazine.This is a pre-print version of a published paper that is available at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8436042. Recommended citation: Xiong, Zehui, Yang Zhang, Dusit Niyato, Ping Wang, and Zhu Han. "When mobile blockchain meets edge computing." IEEE Communications Magazine 56, no. 8 (2018): 33-39. DOI: 10.1109/MCOM.2018.1701095. This item has been deposited in accordance with publisher copyright and licensing terms and with the author's permission.