Trustworthy Edge Computing through Blockchains

Abstract: Edge computing draws a lot of recent research interests because of the performance improvement by offloading many workloads from the remote data center to nearby edge nodes. Nonetheless, one open challenge of this emerging paradigm lies in the potential security issues on edge nodes and end devices, e.g., sensors and controllers. This paper proposes a cooperative protocol, namely DEAN, across edge nodes to prevent data manipulation, and to allow fair data sharing with quick recovery under resource constraints of limited storage, computing, and network capacity. Specifically, DEAN leverages a parallel mechanism equipped with three independent core components, effectively achieving low resource consumption while allowing secured parallel block processing on edge nodes. We have implemented a system prototype based on DEAN and experimentally verified its effectiveness with a comparison with three popular blockchain implementations: Ethereum, Parity, and Hyperledger Fabric. Experimental results show that the system prototype exhibits high resilience to arbitrary failures: the percentile of trusty nodes is much higher than the required 50\% in most cases. Performance-wise, DEAN-based blockchain implementation outperforms the state-of-the-art blockchain systems with up to $25\times$ higher throughput and $18\times$ lower latency on 1,000 nodes.