A Stackelberg Game Based Resource Trading Mechanism Design for Blockchain-enabled Industrial IoT

Resource-consuming blockchain consensus (such as Proof-of-Work) and ever-growing blockchain database inevitably hinder widespread implementation of blockchain in industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) with limited computation and storage resources. To address this issue, we employ the edge computing technology for blockchain-enabled IIoT network, wherein resource-limited lightweight nodes (LNs) offload computation-intensive consensus and block storage tasks to a resource-rich edge node (EN). We model the resource trading mechanism between the EN and LNs as a Stackelberg game, wherein the EN decides the unit prices of its computation and storage resources respectively, and the LNs decide the amount of purchased resources from the EN. Furthermore, we obtain the unique Nash equilibrium among the LNs, and analyze the Stackelberg equilibrium for the entire network. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the optimal computation and storage resource prices are inversely correlated at the EN side.