Blockchain-Enpowered Cooperative Resource Allocation Scheme for Computing First Network

With the fast rapid growth of the Internet services such as AI content generation, multimedia processing, VR vidio etc., with huge demand for computation resources, it is forseen that the computing will become scarce resources in the near future. Computation first network (CFN) conceptualizes networked computing and puts the computation as the primitive of the network, which becomes a promising solution for various computation intensive applications. CFN provides ubiquitous computation access thanks to the resources offered by various computation unit from the cloud, edge and end users’ equipments. Despite its promising, how to offload the continuous arrival computation tasks to various geo-distributed computation units in CFN is of importance to the CFN performance. In this paper, we propose a blockchain empowered resource allocation (BCERA) for CFN. In BCERA, blockchain plays a key role for the task offloading, including recording the resource usage, optimization of the resource allocation. Specifically, we redesign the consensus mechanism in blockchain and allow the blockchain nodes to reach agreement via solving the resource allocation problem in FCN. This resource allocation problem is formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP) and blockchain nodes use the reinforcement learning methods to search the optimum. Besides, considering the resources may be offered from different parties, an incentive mechanism is also presented to encourage the computation units to provide their resources. We conduct a series simulation tests based on our designed blockchain platform to show how BCERA outperforms the state-of-art solutions.