In recent years, with the rise of edge computing in recent years, edge computing and cloud computing have combined to form a hierarchical distributed computing model of end-edge-cloud collaboration, which can provide services with high computing capabilities, high storage capabilities, and low latency. end-edge-cloud collaboration can meet the needs of various applications. However, due to the characteristics of the end-edge-cloud system, the end-edge-cloud system still faces many challenges in trust data storage, trust computing, trust data transmission, and trust end-edge-cloud system management. Blockchain, as a decentralized ledger technology, has the characteristics of data non-tampering, non-forgery, traceability, and joint maintenance by multiple parties (globally consistent). These characteristics make the blockchain a safe management platform to ensure the integrity of data and the availability of system services, so we can integrate the blockchain into the end-edge-cloud architecture, and use these characteristics of the blockchain to solve some of the existing problems of the end-edge-cloud system. Integrating the blockchain into the end-edge-cloud architecture can ensure the credible data storage, and ensure the integrity and availability of the data; the smart contract in the blockchain system can be used as the trusted computing framework of the end-edge-cloud system to realize the end-edge-cloud trusted computing; afterwards, the blockchain can be used to achieve secure and active data transfer between multiple parties, and achieve mutual trust data interaction between end-edge-cloud nodes; finally, the blockchain can be used as the end-edge-cloud equipment management and supervision platform to realizes the credible management of end-edge-cloud system equipment. Although the end-edge-cloud system fusion blockchain system can solve some of its own problems, due to the characteristics of the blockchain in terms of system architecture, privacy protection, node resource requirements and multi-party consensus, the end-edge-cloud architecture integrating with the blockchain will face many challenges: First, the structural mismatch between the blockchain system and the end-edge-cloud system makes it difficult to integrate the two in terms of architecture; Secondly, the transparent characteristics of the blockchain data may cause the end-edge-cloud privacy leak; Thirdly, full copy storage mechanism and consensus mechanism of the blockchain has brought a relatively large resource consumption to the end-edge-cloud system; Finally, the trust model under the end-edge-cloud architecture, the limited node resources and the large-scale access characteristics of end-edge-cloud architecture make the existing blockchain consensus algorithm is not well adapted to the end-edge-cloud scene. These problems all pose challenges to the blockchain under the end-edge-cloud architecture. In response to these issues, this article will review the current research progress of blockchain technology under the end-edge-cloud architecture. This article first introduces the end-edge-cloud architecture and blockchain technology, and then starts from the security issues of the end-edge-cloud architecture, discusses the feasibility and advantages of the integration of the blockchain system and end-edge-cloud system, and summarizes the existing research work on the integration of the two, and discusses some problems faced by the blockchain technology under the end-edge-cloud architecture, and analyze the research work aimed at these problems, and then propose the future research direction of the blockchain technology under the end-edge-cloud architecture. Finally, we summarize the full text. © 2021, Science Press. All right reserved.
