Blockchain-Based Task Offloading for Edge Computing on Low-Quality Data via Distributed Learning in the Internet of Energy

Abstract

With the development of the Internet of energy, more and more participants share data by different types of edge devices. However, such multi-source heterogenous data typically contain low-quality data, e.g., missing values, which may result in potential risks. Besides, resource-constrained devices incur large latency in edge computing networks. To alleviate such latency, distributed task offloading schemes are designed to share the computation burden between edge nodes and nearby servers. However, there are three main drawbacks of such schemes. First, low-quality data are not carefully evaluated by constraints under scenarios, which may result in slow convergence in distributed computation. Second, multi-source data including sensitive information are computed and shared among edge nodes without privacy protection. Third, distributed tasks on low-quality data may result in low-quality results even with an optimal offloading scheme. To address the problems above, a task offloading framework for edge computing based on consortium blockchain and distributed reinforcement learning is proposed in this paper, which can provide high-quality task offloading policies with data privacy protected. This framework consists of three key components: data quality evaluation (DQ) with multiple data quality dimensions, data repairing (DR) with a repairing algorithm based on a novel repairing consensus mechanism and distributed reinforcement learning for task arrangement (DELTA) with a distributed reinforcement learning algorithm based on a novel low-quality data distributing strategy. Numeric results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed task offloading framework for edge computing on low-quality data in the IoE.