When Mobile Blockchain Meets Edge Computing: Challenges and Applications

Blockchain, as the backbone technology of the current popular Bitcoin digital currency, has become a promising decentralized approach for resource and transaction management. Although blockchain has been widely adopted in many applications, e.g., finance, healthcare, and logistics, its application in mobile environments is still limited. This is due to the fact that blockchain users need to solve preset proof-of-work puzzles to add new transactions to the blockchain. Solving the proof-of-work, however, consumes substantial resources in terms of CPU time and energy, which is not suitable for resource-limited mobile devices. To facilitate blockchain applications in future mobile Internet of Things systems, multiple access mobile edge computing appears to be an auspicious option to solve the proof-of-work puzzles for mobile users. We first introduce a novel concept of edge computing for mobile blockchain. Then, we introduce an economic approach for edge computing resource management. Moreover, a demonstrative prototype of mobile edge computing enabled blockchain systems is presented with experimental results to justify the proposed concept.