Scott Eisele, Michael Wilbur, Taha Eghtesad, Kevin Silvergold, Fred Eisele, Ayan Mukhopadhyay, Aron Laszka, Abhishek Dubey
2022 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E) 2022
As edge computing becomes critical for supporting IoT and smart city applications, the centralized cloud paradigm becomes increasingly expensive and inflexible. This work is innovative because it combines blockchain's trust properties with practical market mechanisms to create a decentralized resource trading platform. The approach enables direct peer-to-peer resource trading while maintaining privacy and security guarantees through smart contracts.
This work presents a decentralized market mechanism for allocating computing resources in edge and cloud computing environments. The system uses blockchain technology with Apache Pulsar for messaging to enable customers and suppliers to trade slack computing capacity. Through smart contracts, the framework creates allocation contracts that capture participation from both resource providers and consumers, establishing matching between supply and demand without relying on a centralized market authority.
The proposed market protocol was evaluated with game-theoretic analysis and demonstrated that it incentivizes truthful participation from both customers and suppliers. Through experimentation with streaming computer-vision applications, the authors showed that the decentralized framework can successfully allocate resources and execute service deployments. The system demonstrated robustness in handling the initial deployment delays and maintaining trust without a centralized intermediary.
@inproceedings{eisele2022Decentralized,
author = {Eisele, Scott and Wilbur, Michael and Eghtesad, Taha and Silvergold, Kevin and Eisele, Fred and Mukhopadhyay, Ayan and Laszka, Aron and Dubey, Abhishek},
booktitle = {2022 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E)},
title = {Decentralized Computation Market for Stream Processing Applications},
year = {2022},
address = {Pacific Grove, CA, USA},
month = {oct},
acceptance = {32.6},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
abstract = {While cloud computing is the current standard for outsourcing computation, it can be prohibitively expensive for cities and infrastructure operators to deploy services. At the same time, there are underutilized computing resources within cities and local edge-computing deployments. Using these slack resources may enable significantly lower pricing than comparable cloud computing; such resources would incur minimal marginal expenditure since their deployment and operation are mostly sunk costs. However, there are challenges associated with using these resources. First, they are not effectively aggregated or provisioned. Second, there is a lack of trust between customers and suppliers of computing resources, given that they are distinct stakeholders and behave according to their own interests. Third, delays in processing inputs may diminish the value of the applications. To resolve these challenges, we introduce an architecture combining a distributed trusted computing mechanism, such as a blockchain, with an efficient messaging system like Apache Pulsar. Using this architecture, we design a decentralized computation market where customers and suppliers make offers to deploy and host applications. The proposed architecture can be realized using any trusted computing mechanism that supports smart contracts, and any messaging framework with the necessary features. This combination ensures that the market is robust without incurring the input processing delays that limit other blockchain based solutions. We evaluate the market protocol using game-theoretic analysis to show that deviation from the protocol is discouraged. Finally, we assess the performance of a prototype implementation based on experiments with a streaming computer-vision application.},
contribution = {lead},
keywords = {blockchain, decentralized computing, resource allocation, market mechanism, edge computing, smart contracts, Apache Pulsar},
month_numeric = {10}
}