A Blockchain-Assisted Hierarchical Data Aggregation Framework for IIoT With Computing First Networks

With an increasing number of sensor devices connected to industrial systems, the efficient and reliable aggregation of sensor data has become a key topic in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Computing First Networks (CFN) are emerging as a promising technology for aggregating vast quantities of IIoT data. However, existing CFN data collection frameworks are usually centralized, which overly rely on third-party trusted authorities and fail to fully schedule and utilize limited computing resources. More critically, that is prone to trust and security issues. In this paper, considering the heterogeneity and data security in complex industrial scenarios, we propose a blockchain-based and multi-edge CFN collaborative IIoT data hierarchical collection framework (ME-CIDC) to collect massive IIoT data securely and efficiently. In ME-CIDC, a blockchain-driven resource allocation algorithm is proposed for inter-domain CFN, which achieves distributed and efficient task scheduling and data collection by constructing multiple blockchains. A self-incentive mechanism is designed to encourage inter-domain nodes to contribute resources and support the operation of the inter-domain CFN. We also propose an efficient double-layered data aggregation algorithm, which distributes computational tasks across two layers to ensure the efficient collection and aggregation of IIoT data. Extensive simulation and numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.