Contract-Based Incentive Design for Resource Allocation in Edge Computing-Based Blockchain

To boost the wide applications of the blockchain, Mobile edge computing (MEC) emerges as potential solution that can provide computing resources in terms of computation offloading. In blockchain, pool mining allows to combine a small amount of computing resources to operate together, which helps the miners with small number of resources mine blocks more efficiently. Therefore, a MEC-enabled blockchain has recently received significant research interests. However, how to encourage the involvements of different parties and operate resource allocation in the MEC-enabled blockchain in an efficient manner are still under-investigation. In this paper, we study the problem of resource allocation in a MEC-enabled blockchain network, and design a novel contract-based incentive mechanism to motivate the MEC service providers (SPs) to provide computing services to blockchain miners. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism can improve the payoffs of miners and SPs. Besides, we also analyzed the impact of changes in the number of miners and SPs on network performance based on experimental results, aiming to provide some suggestions to construct efficient resources trading networks.