Social Welfare Maximization Auction in Edge Computing Resource Allocation for Mobile Blockchain

Blockchain, an emerging decentralized security system, has been applied in many applications, such as bitcoin, smart grid, and Internet-of-Things. However, running the mining process may cost too much energy consumption and computing resource usage on handheld devices, which restricts the use of blockchain in mobile environments. In this paper, we consider deploying edge computing service to support the mobile blockchain. We propose an auction-based edge computing resource allocation mechanism for the edge computing service provider. Since there is competition among miners, the allocative externalities are taken into account in the model. In our auction mechanism, we maximize the social welfare while guaranteeing the truthfulness, individual rationality and computational efficiency. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance of our auction mechanism which shows that the proposed mechanism can efficiently solve the social welfare maximization problem for the edge computing service provider.