Blockchain-based Volunteer Edge Cloud for IoT Applications

Cloud computing has been widely used in the field of information services. However, large-scale Internet of things (IoT) applications are raising new challenges to cloud computing architecture. Edge computing, which complements cloud computing, is considered to be the way to address these challenges. Volunteer computing, which harvests idle resources in the network can improve the hardware utilization rate and support tens of billions of IoT devices. In view of the limitations of traditional volunteer computing that cannot provide realtime services and has no mechanism to reward services in existing volunteer clouds, this paper presents blockchain-based volunteer edge cloud. A common runtime environment is provided by container technology, and blockchain smart contract is used for critical business steps and computing service payment. Volunteer edge cloud systems based on blockchain is introduced from a top-level perspective, and a prototype system build on Ethereum and KubeEdge is described in detail. On top of the prototype system, we deployed an example IoT application of robot formation control. It demonstrates the benefits of volunteer edge cloud in reducing the complexity of IoT devices, improving the flexibility of software development, and paying the computing service.