BCEdge: Blockchain-based resource management in D2D-assisted mobile edge computing

In recent decades, newly emerging mobile applications and services are becoming increasingly resource hungry and computation intensive. Portable size mobile devices fall short in providing such services. Cloud computing has been a core computation technology to provide visualized resources in a scalable way for mobile services. However, the unpredictable network transmission latency makes cloud computing not efficient enough for time-sensitive mobile services, which requires major changes in underlying computing platform. Mobile edge computing is widely known as one of the novel technologies has emerged in recent years to address this issue. For being impractical to construct huge edge cloud in network edge, edge clouds can still be overloaded in rush time. Offloading to near-user facilities using device-to-device (D2D) or other technologies becomes an augmentation approach. However, how to manage the facilities/resources effectively become a new issue. In this paper, we proposed a resource management scheme named BCEdge based on blockchain in D2D-assisted mobile edge computing. BCEdge is a reliable scheme that operates in a distributed way to relieve the load of edge clouds. We illustrate the advantages and technical details of BCEdge using flow charts and interaction charts. The experiment results validate the effectiveness of our scheme. Finally, we discuss the possible future extensions.