Learning-Based DApp Task Scheduling for Elastic Hybrid Computing in Edge Web 3.0

Xichun Cai, Lixing Chen, Yang Bai, Xi Lin, Gaolei Li, Jianhua Li

Abstract: Web 3.0 and Edge computing are inherently compatible, making them an ideal combination for building a secure and efficient distributed service platform to support decentralized applications (DApps). This paper investigates an elastic hybrid computing architecture in Edge Web 3.0, allowing DApp tasks to be executed in a hybrid manner by integrating on-chain and off-chain execution. The principle is to transfer a portion of DApp to an off-chain execution environment, along with an appropriate result verification process, to enhance computing efficiency and reduce blockchain overhead. We formulate a DApp task scheduling problem that jointly optimizes the execution pattern and offloading decision of user tasks. A learning-based DApp task scheduling scheme is designed based on Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to minimize the gas cost and service delay of DApps. Particularly, we tailor PPO to handle the hard constraints of service delay, gas consumption, and computing capacity in Edge Web 3.0 by adding regularization terms in the learning objective function. We establish an Edge Web 3.0 testbed based on Goerli, ZkSync, and Ethereum to evaluate the proposed method. The experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks.