Intelligent Sharding Decision for Blockchain-Enabled Industrial IoT Based on A3C Approach

As an essential concept and technology, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a feasible way for the advancement of industrial digitization, networking and intelligence. However, it brings serious security and privacy risks to industrial data. Blockchain technology can address security and privacy risks into the IIoT effectively, but there are a few nonnegligible questions in the current researches: 1) The scalability of the conventional blockchain system is extremely limited, making it unable to handle the rapid uploading of massive data in the IIoT. 2) The large-scale nature of IIoT and complex consensus procedure of blockchain result in excessive computational overhead. 3) The balance between security and computational efficiency is often ignored. To address these problems, we propose the concept of sharding decision blockchain innovatively and formulate the optimization problem as a Markov decision process (MDP). Besides, the combining of mobile edge computing (MEC) and cloud computing is empowered the computational efficiency in the proposed scheme. An asynchronous advantage actor-critic (A3C) approach is taken into account and used to solve the optimization problem. Experimental results indicate that our proposed scheme provides a significant improvement on the IIoT versus other solutions.