Resource Management for Energy-Efficient and Blockchain-Enabled Industrial IoT: A DRL Approach

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has emerged with the developments of various communication technologies. In order to guarantee the security and privacy of massive IIoT data, blockchain is widely considered as a promising technology and applied into IIoT. However, there are still several issues in the existing blockchain-enabled IIoT: 1) unbearable energy consumption for computation tasks, 2) poor efficiency of consensus mechanism in blockchain, and 3) serious computation overhead of network systems. To handle the above issues and challenges, in this paper, we integrate mobile edge computing (MEC) into blockchain-enabled IIoT systems to promote the computation capability of IIoT devices and improve the efficiency of consensus process. Meanwhile, the weighted system cost including the energy consumption and the computation overhead are jointly considered. Moreover, we propose an optimization framework for blockchain-enabled IIoT systems to decrease consumption, and formulate the proposed problem as a Markov decision process (MDP). The master controller, offloading decision, block size and computing server can be dynamically selected and adjusted to optimize the devices energy allocation and reduce the weighted system cost. Accordingly, due to the high-dynamic and large-dimensional characteristics, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is introduced to solve the formulated problem. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme can improve system performance significantly compared to other existing schemes.