Cooperative Assurance of Cache Data Integrity for Mobile Edge Computing

The new mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm fundamentally changes the data caching technique by allowing data to be cached on edge servers attached to base stations within hundreds of meters from users. It provides a bounded latency guarantee for latency-sensitive applications, e.g., interactive AR/VR applications, online gaming, etc. However, in the highly distributed MEC environment, cache data is subject to corruption and their integrity must be ensured. Existing centralized data integrity assurance schemes are rendered obsolete by the unique characteristics of MEC, i.e., unlike cloud servers, edge servers have only limited computing and storage resources and they are deployed massively and distributed geographically. Thus, it is a new and significant challenge to ensure cache data integrity over tremendous geographically-distributed resource-constrained edge servers. This paper proposes the CooperEDI scheme to guarantee the edge data integrity in a distributed manner. CooperEDI employs a distributed consensus mechanism to form a self-management edge caching system. In the system, edge servers cooperatively ensure the integrity of cached replicas and repair corrupted ones. We experimentally evaluate its performance against three representative schemes. The results demonstrate that CooperEDI can effectively and efficiently ensure cache data integrity in the MEC environment.