Edge mining resources allocation among normal and gap blockchains using game theory.

Blockchain is a promising technology that may act as a distributed ledger for Internet of Things (IoT). To maintain blockchain and save operation cost, IoT nodes may play roles of miners (who generate or mine blocks), by renting mining rigs from edge computing service providers. During the mining process, miners will receive rewards, while these rewards incentivize miners to keep mining in turn. However, if the rewards are insufficient, there might be a gap time where no miners participate in mining. We call a blockchain without a gap time a normal chain and a gap chain otherwise. This paper is the first to investigate the allocation of edge computing resources when normal and gap chains coexist. In this paper, we propose a normal gap game to model the allocation over the two types of blockchains which was never proposed before. In our game, miners compete with each other to maximize their respective utilities, by determining the per chain shares and the starting time of their mining rigs. We then develop a calculation framework, which factors in various system parameters to quantify the investment and allocation of mining rigs. We finally evaluate the miners' utilities under different scenarios. This study is very helpful to assist miners for reasonable investment and allocation of edge computing resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]