Game-Based Low Complexity and Near Optimal Task Offloading for Mobile Blockchain Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) finds applications across diverse fields but grapples with privacy and security concerns. Blockchain offers a remedy by instilling trust among IoT devices. The development of blockchain in IoT encounters hurdles due to its resource-intensive computation processing, notably in PoW-based systems. Cloud and edge computing can facilitate the application of blockchain in this environment, and the IoT users who want to mine in blockchain need to pay the computation resource rent to the Cloud Computing Service Provider (CCSP) for offloading the mining workload. In this scenario, these IoT miners can form groups to trade with CCSP to maximize their utility. In this paper, a mixed model of the Stackelberg game and coalition formation game is embraced to address the grouping and pricing issues between IoT miners and CCSP. In particular, the Stackelberg game is utilized to handle the pricing problem, and the coalition formation game is employed to tackle the best group partition problem. Moreover, a coalition formation algorithm is proposed to obtain a near-optimal solution with very low complexity. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can obtain a performance that is very near to the exhaustive search method, outperforms other existing schemes, and requires only a small computation overhead.