Task Sharing and Scheduling for Edge Computing Servers Using Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain

Abstract

Efficient administration of computing resources in Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) networks is a very active research topic. Task sharing in particular, is one of the capital problems with respect to MEC architectures although is mostly addressed from the end-user standpoint. Moreover, standard MEC frameworks do not consider task sharing schemes for computing servers at the edge level even though mechanisms of this kind could increase the utilization of resources in MEC setups. The integration of blockchain technologies into multi server cloud and edge computing solutions has started to gain steam in recent times, largely in part for its potential to enhance the functionality, security, and privacy of cloud-based architectures. In this context, this paper presents a task sharing mechanism for MEC servers with precedent-dependent tasks based on the Hyperledger Fabric framework. Hyperledger Fabric is a blockchain platform that provides a light-weight and distributed interaction playing field for the servers that mitigates the security and privacy concerns related to the collaboration scheme. For sharing tasks among the servers, the call dependencies of the tasks for a user application are captured by a control-flow graph and an optimization problem is formulated to obtain the allocation of tasks. Numerical results on the performance of the proposed task sharing mechanism are presented.