Optimal Auction for Edge Computing Resource Management in Mobile Blockchain Networks: A Deep Learning Approach

Blockchain has recently been applied in many applications such as bitcoin, smart grid, and Internet of Things (IoT) as a public ledger of transactions. However, the use of blockchain in mobile environments is still limited because the mining process consumes too much computing and energy resources on mobile devices. Edge computing offered by the Edge Computing Service Provider (ECSP) can be adopted as a viable solution for offloading the mining tasks from the mobile devices, i.e., miners, in the mobile blockchain environment. However, a mechanism for edge resource allocation to maximize the revenue for the ECSP and to ensure incentive compatibility and individual rationality is still open. In this paper, we develop an optimal auction based on deep learning for the edge resource allocation. Specifically, we construct a multi-layer neural network architecture based on an analytical solution of the optimal auction. The neural networks first perform monotone transformations of the miners' bids. Then, they calculate allocation and conditional payment rules for the miners. We use valuations of the miners as the training data to adjust parameters of the neural networks so as to optimize the loss function which is the expected, negated revenue of the ECSP.We show the experimental results to confirm the benefits of using the deep learning for deriving the optimal auction for mobile blockchain with high revenue.