An increasing number of cloud providers now offer mobile edge computing (MEC) services for their customers to support task offloading. This is undertaken to reduce latency associated with forwarding data from IoT devices owned by customers to cloud platforms. However, two challenges remain in existing MEC scenarios: (i) the coverage of MEC services is limited; (ii) there is limited ability to develop an audit trail about which MEC service providers have processed a user's data. A new architecture for automatically offloading user tasks in MEC scenarios is proposed that addresses the two challenges above. The architecture makes use of drones to dynamically cache data generated from IoT devices and forward this data to MEC servers that participate in a private blockchain network. Our simulated experiments demonstrate the flexibility of the task offloading process through the proposed architecture, which can provide greater visibility of MEC service providers involved in processing users' data.

中文翻译：

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无人机辅助移动边缘计算中基于区块链的任务卸载


现在，越来越多的云提供商为其客户提供移动边缘计算 (MEC) 服务以支持任务卸载。这样做是为了减少将数据从客户拥有的物联网设备转发到云平台相关的延迟。然而，现有的MEC场景仍然存在两个挑战：（i）MEC服务的覆盖范围有限； (ii) 开发有关哪些 MEC 服务提供商处理了用户数据的审计跟踪的能力有限。提出了一种在 MEC 场景中自动卸载用户任务的新架构，解决了上述两个挑战。该架构利用无人机动态缓存物联网设备生成的数据，并将这些数据转发到参与私有区块链网络的 MEC 服务器。我们的模拟实验通过所提出的架构证明了任务卸载过程的灵活性，这可以为参与处理用户数据的 MEC 服务提供商提供更大的可见性。