Coopedge: A decentralized blockchain-based platform for cooperative edge computing

Liang Yuan, Qiang He, Jiangshan Yu, Feifei Chen, Hai Jin, Yun Yang

Abstract:

Edge computing (EC) has recently emerged as a novel computing
paradigm that offers users low-latency services. Suffering from constrained computing resources due to their limited physical sizes,
edge servers cannot always handle all the incoming computation
tasks timely when they operate independently. They often need
to cooperate through peer-offloading. Deployed and managed by
different stakeholders, edge servers operate in a distrusted environment. Trust and incentive are the two main issues that challenge
cooperative computing between them. Another unique challenge
in the EC environment is to facilitate trust and incentive in a decentralized manner. To tackle these challenges systematically, this
paper proposes CoopEdge, a novel blockchain-based decentralized
platform, to drive and support cooperative edge computing. On
CoopEdge, an edge server can publish a computation task for other
edge servers to contend for. A winner is selected from candidate
edge servers based on their reputations. After that, a consensus
is reached among edge servers to record the performance in task
execution on blockchain. We implement CoopEdge based on Hyperledger Sawtooth and evaluate it experimentally against a baseline
and two state-of-the-art implementations in a simulated EC environment. The results validate the usefulness of CoopEdge and
demonstrate its performance.