Resource Allocation for Mobile Blockchain: A Hierarchical Combinatorial Auction Approach
Shan Li, Kun Zhu, Yuanyuan Xu, Ran Wang, Yanchao Zhao · 2019
As a decentralized ledger to record all transaction information, blockchain can be applied to address the security and privacy issues in mobile application system. We term the blockchain applied to mobile applications as mobile blockchain. The mining process in mobile blockchain requires high computing capacity and energy which could overwhelm that mobile devices can offer. In this case, mobile edge computing servers (MESs) can be involved to offer computation services to miners in mobile blockchain. Note that the resources of MESs are also limited, MESs could further request resources from the cloud computing server (CCS). Accordingly, in this paper, both mobile edge computing and cloud computing are considered to support the mobile blockchain applications which makes the problem a hierarchical one. Naturally, the issue of hierarchical resource allocation arises. And a hierarchical combinatorial auction model is proposed to solve this problem, based on which an efficient and truthful framework is provided. Specifically, we formulate winner determination problems (WDPs) for mobile edge computing service providers and cloud computing service provider, and computationally tractable algorithms to address both problems are proposed. Finally, numerical analysis shows the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.