Blockchain-Inspired Secure Computation Offloading in a Vehicular Cloud Network

With the emergence of computation-intensive vehicular applications, computation offloading based on mobile-edge computing (MEC) has become a promising paradigm in resource-constrained vehicular cloud networks (VCNs). However, when doing computation offloading in a VCN, malicious service providers can cause serious security concerns on the content offloading. To address that in this article, a blockchain-based secure computation offloading scheduling scheme is proposed. It embraces the blockchain-based trust management paradigm and smart contract-enabled deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm. As for the trust management, the long-term reputation and short-term trust variability are jointly considered. Specifically, a novel three-valued subjective logic (3VSL) scheme is adopted to obtain a more comprehensive reputation, and the statistics of behavioral transitions can provide a short-term trust variability to timely capture the malicious behaviors. In addition, to securely update, validate, and store the trust information, we propose a hierarchical blockchain framework that comprises vehicular blockchain, roadside unit (RSU) blockchain, and cloud blockchain. Furthermore, a smart contract-enabled DRL algorithm is proposed to implement the secure and intelligent computation offloading scheduling in a VCN. Simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.