Three-stage Stackelberg game based edge computing resource management for mobile blockchain

Blockchain can provide a dependable environment for mobile applications. Mining, as an important component in blockchain, requires a lot of computing resources, and hence resource limited moblie devices are unable to perform the mining. Offloading mining computation tasks to an edge computing service provider (ESP) or a cloud computing service provider (CSP) is considered as a feasible solution to mobile blockchain mining. However, the computing resources of the ESP are not unlimited. Therefore, rational edge computing resource management is critical to maximizing the utilities of the ESP and the miners. Most of the existing work assumes the computation is offloaded to either the CSP or the ESP which serves the terminal devices. However, an ESP can also offload the computation to the other ESPs, when the ESP is overloaded. In this paper, we construct a computation offloading model composed of multiple miners, multiple ESPs, and a CSP, where an overloaded ESP can offload the mining tasks to the CSP or the other ESPs or both. We propose a three-stage Stackelberg game for optimal pricing-based edge computing resource management. We analyze the existence and uniqueness of Stackelberg game equilibrium and derive the optimal amount of computing resource requests from the miners. We then propose a simple yet effective golden section based Stackelberg game equilibrium searching algorithm SES for resource pricing. We conduct experiments through simulations. Experimental results show that the proposed computing offloading model and algorithm can achieve high unit service utilities of both the ESPs and the terminal devices.