Blockchain-Based Collaborative Task Offloading in MEC: A Hyperledger Fabric Framework

Abstract

While task offloading is one of the fundamental problems in Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) systems, most of the time it is only approached from the end-user point of view. In fact, traditional MEC frameworks do not consider the possibility of task offloading services among edge servers, which would be a means to increase the utilization and overall efficiency of the MEC architecture. However, such task offloading services could be vulnerable to many security and privacy threats. In this context, this paper proposes to use blockchain as an instrument to support the implementation of a task offloading scheme in a MEC framework from the standpoint of edge servers. The proposed mechanism runs on top of the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain that will provide a light-weight distributed interaction field that minimizes many security and privacy concerns. The main goal of this paper is to put forward a blockchain-based Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that allows secure and private task offloading collaboration among edge servers in a MEC environment.