Faster service with less resource: A resource efficient blockchain framework for edge computing

Abstract

By integrating edge computing with blockchain technology, traceable and immutable services can be provided to address the distrust issue between edge devices. However, the contradiction between the computing and storage consumption of blockchain deployment and the constrained resources of edge devices is the greatest obstacle standing in the way. Reducing blockchain demand for computing power and storage becomes the main challenge to ameliorate the current dilemma.To address the above challenge, this article proposes a resource-efficient blockchain framework for edge computing. By analyzing the necessity of resources in the consensus, we divide the resource bottleneck of edge devices into the unnecessary computing resource and necessary storage resource to provide different resource reduction approaches. For unnecessary computing resource, a novel cloud–edge collaboration consensus protocol called the Proof-of-Ticket (PoT) has been proposed to completely offload the computing consumption in the execution of consensus protocol from edge devices to the cloud. For necessary storage resource, we propose a framework division mechanism based on the closure of service scenarios called the edge–terminal consensus zone (ETCZ). The storage requirement for edge devices working as full nodes in each ETCZ has significant decline. The extensive experiments are tested to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Experiments show that the individual computing cost of edge devices has been completely offload to the cloud, and the minimum storage cost for a full node is reduced into 1K of the traditional blockchain in a K-ETCZ framework.