Toward Blockchain-Powered Trusted Collaborative Services for Edge-Centric Networks

Collaborative edge computing (CEC) is a novel extension for several edge paradigms (e.g., mobile edge computing, fog computing, and cloudlet) to further enhance processing capabilities to support computation-intensive and latency-sensitive applications in edge-centric networks. While existing schemes keep adding new functionalities (e.g., collaborative computing and caching), they overlook an important issue of establishing trustworthiness among all CEC participants. In general, due to the heterogeneity of all participants, simply assuming trustworthiness among them is undesirable. To address this issue, in this article, we present BlockEdge, a blockchain-powered framework that delivers trusted CEC services. Toward this end, BlockEdge first introduces incentive schemes to attract edge nodes to participate in CEC tasks. Then it publicly and persistently stores all task results on blockchain to enable smart-contract-based correctness verification and automated punishment in case of failures. Such a built-in accountability scheme allows BlockEdge to establish a trust reputation system for all CEC stakeholders, which can be further used for reliable selection of CEC participators. Our security analysis and experimental evaluation demonstrate that BlockEdge is both technically feasible and financially beneficial. We hope that the blockchain-based trustworthiness establishment designed in BlockEdge can provide a fundamental primitive for building a more secure collaborative ecosystem, especially for complex networks such as 5G and IoT.