Optimal pricing-based computation offloading and resource allocation for blockchain-enabled beyond 5G networks

Computation offloading has been considered as a promising solution for resource-constrained mobile devices supporting computation-intensive mobile collaborative applications in beyond 5G networks. By leveraging network-assisted device-to-device (D2D) collaboration, resource-constrained mobile devices are able to offload computation tasks to nearby resource-sharing mobile devices. Meanwhile, blockchain technology is developing rapidly and has been applied to mobile scenarios with massive information interaction for establishing trust between mobile devices. However, the computing power of mobile devices is limited by the physical size and battery capacity, which is not enough to cope with the high computation overhead for blockchain mining process. Thus, offloading mining tasks to the edge servers becomes a viable option. This paper investigates both of the D2D task offloading problem and the mining task offloading problem in a blockchain-enabled beyond 5G network. For the purpose of efficient resource allocation, the former is formulated as a double auction market and the latter is formulated as a Stackelberg game. Moreover, we propose two pricing based schemes to solve these two computation offloading problems, among which Bayes-Nash equilibrium and Stackelberg equilibrium are analyzed. At last, by comparison with the benchmark, the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed schemes are evaluated. Numerical results show that both of the double auction based normal task offloading scheme and the Stackelberg game based mining task offloading scheme are able to improve the utility of resource demanders and providers.