Title: Optimal Pricing-Based Edge Computing Resource Management in Mobile Blockchain,
Abstract: As the core issue of blockchain, the mining requires solving a proof-of-work
puzzle, which is resource expensive to implement in mobile devices due to high
computing power needed. Thus, the development of blockchain in mobile
applications is restricted. In this paper, we consider the edge computing as
the network enabler for mobile blockchain. In particular, we study optimal
pricing-based edge computing resource management to support mobile blockchain
applications where the mining process can be offloaded to an Edge computing
Service Provider (ESP). We adopt a two-stage Stackelberg game to jointly
maximize the profit of the ESP and the individual utilities of different
miners. In Stage I, the ESP sets the price of edge computing services. In Stage
II, the miners decide on the service demand to purchase based on the observed
prices. We apply the backward induction to analyze the sub-game perfect
equilibrium in each stage for uniform and discriminatory pricing schemes.
Further, the existence and uniqueness of Stackelberg game are validated for
both pricing schemes. At last, the performance evaluation shows that the ESP
intends to set the maximum possible value as the optimal price for profit
maximization under uniform pricing. In addition, the discriminatory pricing
helps the ESP encourage higher total service demand from miners and achieve
greater profit correspondingly.