Cooperative Computation Offloading in Blockchain-Based Vehicular Edge Computing Networks

As a novel computing paradigm, multiaccess edge computing (MEC) migrates computing and storage capabilities to edge nodes of the network to meet the requirements of executing computationally intensive or delay-sensitive tasks on intelligent vehicles. In addition, MEC fills the gap between cloud computing and terminals in vehicular networks. In the MEC system, to reduce the load on MEC servers with large-scale vehicle deployment and promote the efficient use of network resources, vehicles can also transfer tasks to neighboring resource-rich vehicles using cooperative computation offloading. However, cooperative computation offloading between vehicles faces the challenges of security and insufficient information about the server vehicle. Therefore, this paper proposes using blockchain technology to achieve efficient data sharing between vehicles and service providers (i.e., server vehicles) and ensure the security of computation offloading between vehicles. First, we design a secure data sharing architecture in blockchain-based vehicular edge computing networks. Then, a new consensus mechanism in this architecture is proposed to improve the efficiency of data sharing and prevent malicious attacks. Furthermore, we present a cooperative offloading decision-making method using an offloading game, and the Nash equilibrium of the offloading strategy is achieved using this method. The results of numerical experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.