Edge Computing and Lightning Network Empowered Secure Food Supply Management

Keke Gai, Zhengkang Fang, Ruili Wang, Liehuang Zhu, Peng Jiang, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo

Abstract: The recent COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of food safety and supply chain governance. In other words, we need to ensure traceability along the supply chain and support high-frequency transactions, effective data collections, etc. Thus, we posit the potential of using a lightning network, which is a decentralized traceable paradigm for achieving high-frequency transactions in blockchain-based systems. In addition, we also utilize edge computing to help facilitate data collection. However, a key challenge in securing food supplies is determining the optimal global transaction path in the lightning network while achieving efficiency and meeting the dynamic nature of food supply management. Thus, we propose a blockchain-edge scheme that utilizes our proposed dynamic programming to produce optimal solutions for selecting global transaction paths. Specifically, our scheme optimizes routing fees under existing constraints (e.g., transmission cost, computing resource consumption, and lightning network balance). The findings from our evaluations demonstrate the utility of our proposed approach in facilitating food safety management.