DEAN: A Lightweight and Resource-efficient Blockchain Protocol for Reliable Edge Computing

Edge computing draws a lot of recent research interests because of the performance improvement by offloading many workloads from the remote data center to nearby edge nodes. Nonetheless, one open challenge of this emerging paradigm lies in the potential security issues on edge nodes. This paper proposes a cooperative protocol, namely DEAN, equipped with a unique resource-efficient quorum building mechanism to adopt blockchain seamlessly in an edge computing infrastructure to prevent data manipulation and allow fair data sharing with quick recovery under resource constraints of limited storage, computing, and network capacity. Specifically, DEAN leverages a parallel mechanism equipped with three independent core components, effectively achieving low resource consumption while allowing secured parallel block processing on edge nodes. We have implemented a system prototype based on DEAN and experimentally verified its effectiveness with a comparison with four popular blockchain implementations: Ethereum, Parity, IOTA, and Hyperledger Fabric. Experimental results show that the system prototype exhibits high resilience to arbitrary failures. Performance-wise, DEAN-based blockchain implementation out-performs the state-of-the-art blockchain systems with up to 88.6 x higher throughput and 26 x lower latency.