Authentication Security Level and Resource Optimization of Computation Offloading in Edge Computing Systems

Edge computing brings computation and storage resources to the edge of the mobile network to meet strict delay and high demanding applications. However, edge network environments are more vulnerable to malicious attacks. Reliable communication in networks usually relies heavily on verifying the authentication of content and identity. Nevertheless, enhancing the authentication security level means occupying more computation resources, time, and energy. There is a tradeoff between security level improvement and resource optimization in computation offloading. In this article, we take maximizing the authentication security level of the Merkle tree signature as segmental of the optimization objective and consider the different hash algorithms deployed on the edge servers to make the offloading decision. Specifically, to weight the time delay and authentication security level simultaneously, we formulate a minimum optimization problem to jointly optimize the offloading decision, packet transmitting rate, edge computation frequency, and data blocks number. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithms have well convergence and effectiveness and provide a tradeoff between time delay and authentication security level.