Incentive Mechanism for Edge-Computing-Based Blockchain

Abstract

Blockchain has been gradually applied to different Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. As the efficiency of the blockchain mainly depends on the network computing capability, how to make sure the acquisition of the computational resources and participation of the devices would be the driving force. In this work, we focus on investigating incentive mechanism for rational miners to purchase the computational resources. A edge computing-based blockchain network is considered, where the edge service provider (ESP) can provide computational resources for the miners. Accordingly, we formulate a two-stage Stackelberg game between the miners and ESP. The aim is to investigate Stackelberg equilibrium of the optimal mining strategy under the two different mining schemes, in order to find the optimal incentive for the ESP and miners to choose auto-fit strategies. Through theoretical analysis and numerical simulation, we can demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme on encouraging devices to participate the blockchain.