Incentive Assignment in Hybrid Consensus Blockchain Systems in Pervasive Edge Environments

Edge computing is becoming pervasive in our daily lives with emerging smart devices and the development of communication technology. Smart devices with various resources make data transactions prevalent over edge environments. To ensure such transactions are unmodifiable and undeniable, blockchain technology is introduced into edge environments. In this paper, we propose a hybrid blockchain system to enhance the security for transactions and determine the incentive for miners in edge computing environments. We propose a Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) hybrid consensus blockchain system utilizing the heterogeneity of devices to adapt to the characteristic of edge environments. We raise the incentive assignment problem for a fair incentive to PoW miners. We formulate the problem and propose an iterative and another heuristic algorithm to determine the incentive that the miner will receive for a new block. We further prove that the iterative algorithm can obtain global optimal results. Simulation and experiment results show that our proposed algorithm can give a reasonable incentive to miners under different system parameters in edge blockchain systems.