Cloud/Edge Computing Resource Allocation and Pricing for Mobile Blockchain: An Iterative Greedy and Search Approach

Blockchain can provide a dependable environment for the Internet of Things (IoT), while the high computing power and energy required by blockchain hinder its applications in IoT. Offloading the computation at the resource-limited IoT devices to a cloud/edge computing service provider (CESP) is a feasible solution to the execution of computation-intensive blockchain tasks. The CESP provides computing resources to IoT users with a cloud and multiple edge servers that work collaboratively such that the users are able to perform mobile blockchain services. Resource allocation and pricing of computing resources at the cloud/edges have a significant impact on the revenues of CESP and users. Most of the existing works on the cooperative edge–cloud for computation offloading assumes that a user is mapped to a prespecified edge server or the cloud. However, the CESP may choose a server from either the edge servers or the cloud to run the offloaded tasks by jointly considering the cost and income of the service provisioning. In this article, we formulate a Stackelberg game with CESP as the leader and users as the followers for cloud/edge computing resource management. We prove the existence of Stackelberg equilibrium and analyze the equilibrium. We then model the resource allocation and pricing at the CESP as a mixed-integer programming problem (MIP) with the objective to optimize the CESP’s revenue and propose an efficient iterative greedy-and-search-based resource allocation and pricing algorithm (IGS). The algorithm solves two subproblems comprising the CESP’s revenue optimization problem: resource allocation under a given resource price and resource pricing based on a specified resource allocation scheme. The first subproblem evaluates where to execute the computing tasks via a greedy-and-search-based approach, whereas the second subproblem estimates the resource price through golden section search. We conduct experiments through simulations. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the revenue of both the CESP and the IoT terminals.