Blockchain for Edge Computing

Blockchain, the technology that powers the current popular Bitcoin digital currency, has evolved into a promising decentralized data management framework. Although blockchain has been widely adopted in many applications, such as healthcare and logistics, its use in mobile services remains challenging. The key concept in blockchain to ensure data integrity and validity is a computational process known as mining. This process consumes significant resources in terms of CPU time and energy, making it unsuitable for resource-limited mobile devices. One solution for offloading computationally intensive tasks from IoT nodes is edge computing (EC). Edge computing brings computing, storage, and analytics closer to end devices that generate the data. Moreover, blockchain has the potential to solve the security and privacy issues associated with edge computing, such as access control, privacy, and authentication. Edge computing, in conjunction with blockchain, appears to be a winning combination for developing a secure, scalable, and distributed IoT platform. The Edge Computing technology aims at providing the computing resources needed by the blockchain technology.

Both blockchain and edge computing have their shortcomings. On one hand, blockchain lacks scalability, as the number of transactions per second is still very low compared with the amount of data generated by IoT devices. Blockchain is a distributed ledger where each participant maintains a full working copy of the blocks, raising storage issues. On the other hand, because of the heterogeneous organizational form of edge computing, potential security issues, such as local network authentication and encryption requirements for local user data, may arise. A blockchain-based edge computing system that combines two fields still has potential open issues.

This Research Topic aims at addressing the technical challenges arising from the integration of the two technologies, blockchain and edge computing, such as:
1- Scalability
2- Consensus Optimization
3- Interoperability
4- Security

Topics of interest to the Research Topic include, but are not limited to, the following:

- Innovative blockchain and edge computing integrated architectures
- Use of blockchain techniques for edge-computing security, privacy, and trust
- Resource management in blockchain-edge computing systems
- Data storage management in blockchain-edge computing systems
- Scalable consensus algorithms
- Lightweight blockchain designs in blockchain-edge computing systems
- Innovative applications in blockchain-edge computing systems

Keywords: IoT, blockchain, security, edge computing, data offloading

Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.