A Decentralized and Trusted Edge Computing Platform for Internet of Things

With the development of Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing becomes more and more prevalent currently. However, edge computing needs to deploy a large number of edge servers to reduce the communication latency, which will bring additional costs to the system. Although there exist some idle computing resources at the edge, the owners distrust each other and lack the incentives to contribute to the system. In this article, we propose a new edge computing platform decentralized and trusted platform for edge computing (DeTEC), which provides a unified interface to users, resolves the user’s requests to the most appropriate edge server through domain name server, and returns the computational results to the IoT user. To build a trustworthy system, DeTEC integrates the blockchain technology with edge computing, such that the contributions of each participant could be accounted and rewarded. We formulate the task allocation problem, taking both node capacity and reward fairness into consideration, and solve it through a heuristic algorithm. Finally, to guarantee the trustworthiness of computational results, we utilize a police patrol model and try to optimize the system overall reward. We implement DeTEC based on an open source project and conduct comprehensive experiments to test its performance. The results show that our DeTEC system works well in the IoT scenario.