Making Big Data Open in Edges: A Resource-Efficient Blockchain-Based Approach

• Published in: IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems Vol. 30; no. 4; pp. 870 - 882
• Main Authors: Xu, Chenhan, Wang, Kun, Li, Peng, Guo, Song, Luo, Jiangtao, Ye, Baoliu, Guo, Minyi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.04.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Big Data; Blockchain; collaborative edges; consensus mechanism; Cryptocurrency; Cryptography; Data management; Data retrieval; Distributed databases; Distributed processing; Edge computing; Electronic devices; transaction offloading
• ISSN: 1045-9219; 1558-2183
• DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2018.2871449

The emergence of edge computing has witnessed a fast-growing volume of data on edge devices belonging to different stakeholders which, however, cannot be shared among them due to the lack of the trust. By exploiting blockchain's non-repudiation and non-tampering properties that enable trust, we develop a blockchain-based big data sharing framework to support various applications across resource-limited edges. In particular, we devise a number of novel resource-efficient techniques for the framework: (1) the PoC (Proof-of-Collaboration) based consensus mechanism with low computation complexity which is especially beneficial to the edge devices with low computation capacity, (2) the blockchain transaction filtering and offloading scheme that can significantly reduce the storage overhead, and (3) new types of blockchain transaction (i.e., Express Transaction) and block (i.e., Hollow Block) to enhance the communication efficiency. Extensive experiments are conducted and the results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposal.