EdgeABC: An architecture for task offloading and resource allocation in the Internet of Things

The evolving Internet of Things (IoT) faces considerable challenges in terms of sensitive delay requirements for tasks, reasonable allocation requirements of resources, and reliability requirements of resource transactions. In the paper, considering these problems, we propose an emerging IoT architecture EdgeABC introduced the blockchain to ensure the integrity of resource transaction data and the profits of service provider, and we also propose a Task Offloading and Resource Allocation (TO-RA) algorithm, where the TO-RA algorithm is implemented on the blockchain in the form of smart contracts. In other words, the architecture proposed optimizes the resource allocation in IoT based on the advantages of the blockchain. Specifically, we first propose a subtask-virtual machine mapping strategy to complete the Task Offloading (TO) and the first allocation of resources; then aiming at the possible load imbalance problem of the system, we propose a stack cache supplement mechanism to complete the Resource Allocation (RA) based on the TO strategy. Finally, simulation experiments verify that the fairness, user satisfaction, and system utility of the TO-RA algorithm are superior to traditional algorithms.