Multi-UAV Cooperative Task Offloading in Blockchain-Enabled MEC for Consumer Electronics

The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has made the traditional Consumer Electronics (CE) evolve into a next-generation CE with many intelligent application which generates a large number of computing-intensive tasks and is sensitive to latency. The combination of blockchain technology and multi-UAV-assisted edge computing is considered a promising technology that can process tasks near CE devices instead of sending data to remote data centers, and it has advantages in flexible deployment, differentiated services, and security assurance. This paper considers a Blockchain-enabled MEC scenario where CE devices can offload tasks to multiple-UAV-edge layers for decentralized cooperative computing, and utilize the reputation mechanism of blockchain to identify abnormal nodes in edge offloading. To solve the problem of computation offloading and resource allocation in this scenario, we jointly optimize the CPU cycle frequencies and offloading resources of UAVs and CE devices, and the decision of UAVs. Our goal is to minimize system energy consumption while ensuring the quality of service. The stochastic optimization technique is employed to transform the original stochastic optimization problem into a deterministic optimization problem, decomposing it into multiple sub-problems which can be solved in parallel. Additionally, we design a dynamic priority scoring strategy to facilitate cooperative processing among multiple UAVs and propose a Blockchain-Based Multi-UAV Cooperative Task Offloading (BMCTO) algorithm. Through theoretical analysis and simulation experiments, we demonstrate that the BMCTO algorithm can effectively reduce system energy consumption while maintaining system performance.