Integration of MEC and Blockchain
Bin Qian Cao, Weikang Liu, Mugen Peng · 2021
Mobile edge computing (MEC) sinks computing power to the edge of networks and integrates mobile access networks and Internet services in 5G and beyond. With the continuous development of services, heterogeneous MEC systems were proposed to carry out the massive and complex computing services. However, when it comes to multiserver collaboration, trust and security issues would come to the fore. With large-scale access support capability, public blockchain network (PBN) has been widely adapted to provide the trust and security enhancement for various services because of its key characteristics of decentralization, distributed consistency, consensus, etc., which can effectively resolve the problems mentioned in heterogeneous MEC. As for PBN, the adopted proof-of-work consensus mechanism is computationally intensive, posing an obstacle to the application in wireless mobile networks, because most Internet of Things/mobile devices (IMDs) are resource limited. In contrast, however, by allowing resource-limited IMDs to offload their computation tasks to the edge servers, MEC, in turn, can solve the resource-intensive problems faced by PBN.