Autonomous and Incentivized Wireless Connection for Robust Mobile Blockchain Network

Blockchain has been widely implemented as a trusted platform. Previous works mainly focus on the computing capacity of devices while communication factors play a vital role in blockchain performance during dynamic wireless environments. High-speed movement causes frequent wireless connection interruptions and leads to severe performance degradation of blockchain. Besides, resource-constrained mobile devices are unwilling to selflessly contribute their energy and bandwidth for blockchain, hindering applications in dynamic mobile networks. This paper proposes a reverse auction mechanism to incentivize mobile devices to provide robust wireless connections. Devices submit their connection provision and expected rewards as bids. The mobile blockchain system uses smart contracts to autonomously execute the reverse auction to determine winners and allocate payments based on actual connections. We prove that the reverse auction mechanism is Individual Rationality (IR), Incentive Compatibility (IC), and Computational Efficiency (CE), and derive the approximation ratio 2<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sigma$</tex-math></inline-formula> of the mechanism. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism decreases up to half the energy and bandwidth consumption, but achieves a similar TPS and stale rate compared to the selfless scheme, where devices contribute all wireless connections for nothing in return. The proposed auction mechanism achieves more than 96% of the optimal social welfare.