Joint Resource Pricing and Quality Control for Cloud Mining Services in Blockchain Networks: A Game-Theoretic Analysis
Licheng Ye, Xian Xiu, Zehui Xiong, Lin Gao · 2024
The mining process in blockchain networks generates substantial computing consumption, which can be very challenging for miners operated by mobile users (MUs) with limited computing resources. Cloud mining service (CMS) offers a viable solution to this challenge by allowing miners to offload computation-intensive mining tasks to cloud mining providers (CMP) with abundant resources. One key problem in such a scenario is to design an effective resource pricing mechanism for the CMP. Existing researches in this field mainly focused on the differentiated pricing mechanisms, where different MUs are required to pay different prices, which are often very complicated. In this work, we explore an efficient resource pricing mechanism, where the CMP sets a uniform price for all MUs but regulates the quality of resources for different MUs. Such a mechanism can capture the key essence of differentiated pricing and greatly reduce complexity. Based on this novel mechanism, we establish a two-stage Stackelberg game between the CMP and MUs, which consists of a resource pricing and quality control problem (for the CMP) as the first stage and a mining competition game (among all MUs) as the second stage. We derive the closed-form Nash equilibrium for the mining competition game in the second stage and propose a successive convex approximation (SCA)-based algorithm that converges to the near-optimal solution in the first stage. Simulation results show that the proposed iterative algorithm can improve system utility by 32.5% compared to other schemes.