{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,6]],"date-time":"2026-02-06T00:45:29Z","timestamp":1770338729900,"version":"3.49.0"},"reference-count":59,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"9","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2022,4,22]],"date-time":"2022-04-22T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1650585600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"National Key R&amp;D Program of China","award":["2019YFB2102404"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2019YFB2102404"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Sensors"],"abstract":"<jats:p>A mobile edge computing (MEC)-enabled blockchain system is proposed in this study for secure data storage and sharing in internet of things (IoT) networks, with the MEC acting as an overlay system to provide dynamic computation offloading services. Considering latency-critical, resource-limited, and dynamic IoT scenarios, an adaptive system resource allocation and computation offloading scheme is designed to optimize the scalability performance for MEC-enabled blockchain systems, wherein the scalability is quantified as MEC computational efficiency and blockchain system throughput. Specifically, we jointly optimize the computation offloading policy and block generation strategy to maximize the scalability of MEC-enabled blockchain systems and meanwhile guarantee data security and system efficiency. In contrast to existing works that ignore frequent user movement and dynamic task requirements in IoT networks, the joint performance optimization scheme is formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP). Furthermore, we design a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG)-based algorithm to solve the MDP problem and define the multiple and variable number of consecutive time slots as a decision epoch to conduct model training. Specifically, DDPG can solve an MDP problem with a continuous action space and it only requires a straightforward actor\u2013critic architecture, making it suitable for tackling the dynamics and complexity of the MEC-enabled blockchain system. As demonstrated by simulations, the proposed scheme can achieve performance improvements over the deep Q network (DQN)-based scheme and some other greedy schemes in terms of long-term transactional throughput.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/s22093217","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2022,4,24]],"date-time":"2022-04-24T00:45:21Z","timestamp":1650761121000},"page":"3217","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":10,"title":["Joint Optimization for Mobile Edge Computing-Enabled Blockchain Systems: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"22","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-4114-2983","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Zhuoer","family":"Hu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Distributed Computing and Service, Ministry of Education, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-0162-2445","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Hui","family":"Gao","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Distributed Computing and Service, Ministry of Education, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Taotao","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-8014-8050","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Daoqi","family":"Han","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Distributed Computing and Service, Ministry of Education, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Yueming","family":"Lu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Distributed Computing and Service, Ministry of Education, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,4,22]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"22","DOI":"10.1109\/JIOT.2014.2306328","article-title":"Internet of Things for smart cities","volume":"1","author":"Zanella","year":"2014","journal-title":"IEEE Internet Things J."},{"key":"ref_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"4660","DOI":"10.1109\/JIOT.2018.2875542","article-title":"Blockchain for secure and efficient data sharing in vehicular edge computing and networks","volume":"6","author":"Kang","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Internet Things J."},{"key":"ref_3","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"78","DOI":"10.1109\/MNET.2018.1700344","article-title":"Blockchain enabled security in electric vehicles cloud and edge computing","volume":"32","author":"Liu","year":"2018","journal-title":"IEEE Netw. Mag."},{"key":"ref_4","unstructured":"Wang, H., Osen, O.L., Li, G., Li, W., Dai, H., and Zeng, W. (2015, January 1\u20134). Big data and industrial Internet of Things for the maritime industry in northwestern Norway. Proceedings of the TENCON 2015\u20142015 IEEE Region 10 Conference, Macau, China."},{"key":"ref_5","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"677","DOI":"10.1109\/JIOT.2017.2724845","article-title":"Multitier fog computing with large-scale IoT data analytics for smart cities","volume":"5","author":"He","year":"2018","journal-title":"IEEE Internet Things J."},{"key":"ref_6","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"68","DOI":"10.1109\/MITP.2017.3051335","article-title":"Can blockchain strengthen the Internet of Things?","volume":"19","author":"Kshetri","year":"2017","journal-title":"IT Prof."},{"key":"ref_7","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"100895","DOI":"10.1016\/j.softx.2021.100895","article-title":"PADRES: Tool for PrivAcy, Data REgulation and Security","volume":"17","author":"Pereira","year":"2022","journal-title":"SoftwareX"},{"key":"ref_8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"15","DOI":"10.1109\/MITP.2018.032501742","article-title":"Blockchain and the Internet of Things in the industrial sector","volume":"20","author":"Miller","year":"2018","journal-title":"IT Prof."},{"key":"ref_9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"840","DOI":"10.1109\/TDSC.2016.2616861","article-title":"Security and privacy in decentralized energy trading through multi-signatures, blockchain and anonymous messaging streams","volume":"15","author":"Aitzhan","year":"2018","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput."},{"key":"ref_10","first-page":"3690","article-title":"Consortium blockchain for secure energy trading in industrial Internet of Things","volume":"14","author":"Li","year":"2018","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Ind. Inform."},{"key":"ref_11","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"3571","DOI":"10.1109\/TII.2019.2904049","article-title":"LightChain: A Lightweight Blockchain System for Industrial Internet of Things","volume":"15","author":"Liu","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Ind. Inform."},{"key":"ref_12","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1754","DOI":"10.1093\/rfs\/hhz007","article-title":"Blockchain disruption and smart contracts","volume":"32","author":"Cong","year":"2019","journal-title":"Rev. Financ. Stud."},{"key":"ref_13","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Zheng, Z., Xie, S., Dai, H., Chen, X., and Wang, H. (2017, January 25\u201330). An overview of blockchain technology: Architecture, consensus, and future trends. Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE International Congress on Big Data (BigData Congress), Honolulu, HI, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/BigDataCongress.2017.85"},{"key":"ref_14","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Chen, W., Ma, M., Ye, Y., Zheng, Z., and Zhou, Y. (2018, January 26\u201329). IoT service based on joint cloud blockchain: The case study of smart traveling. Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE Symposium on Service-Oriented System Engineering (SOSE), Bamberg, Germany.","DOI":"10.1109\/SOSE.2018.00036"},{"key":"ref_15","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"3559","DOI":"10.1109\/TII.2019.2897805","article-title":"Performance optimization for blockchain-enabled industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems: A deep reinforcement learning approach","volume":"15","author":"Liu","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Ind. Inf."},{"key":"ref_16","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2906","DOI":"10.1109\/TVT.2019.2894944","article-title":"Toward Secure Blockchain-Enabled Internet of Vehicles: Optimizing Consensus Management Using Reputation and Contract Theory","volume":"68","author":"Kang","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol."},{"key":"ref_17","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"4671","DOI":"10.1109\/JIOT.2018.2874222","article-title":"Blockchain-Based Secure Time Protection Scheme in IoT","volume":"6","author":"Fan","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Internet Things J."},{"key":"ref_18","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"31","DOI":"10.1109\/MNET.021.1900629","article-title":"Blockchain-Based Data Security for Artificial Intelligence Applications in 6G Networks","volume":"34","author":"Li","year":"2020","journal-title":"IEEE Netw."},{"key":"ref_19","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"30","DOI":"10.1109\/MC.2017.9","article-title":"The emergence of edge computing","volume":"50","author":"Satyanarayanan","year":"2017","journal-title":"Computer"},{"key":"ref_20","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Li, J., Gao, H., Lv, T., and Lu, Y. (2018, January 15\u201318). Deep reinforcement learning based computation offloading and resource allocation for MEC. Proceedings of the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), Barcelona, Spain.","DOI":"10.1109\/WCNC.2018.8377343"},{"key":"ref_21","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"8507","DOI":"10.1109\/JIOT.2019.2919781","article-title":"Coalition game-based computation resource allocation for wireless blockchain networks","volume":"6","author":"Zhao","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Internet Things J."},{"key":"ref_22","unstructured":"Nguyen, D.C., Pathirana, P.N., Ding, M., and Seneviratne, A. (2019). Secure computation offloading in blockchain based IoT works with deep reinforcement learning. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_23","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2787","DOI":"10.1016\/j.comnet.2010.05.010","article-title":"The Internet of Things: A survey","volume":"54","author":"Atzori","year":"2010","journal-title":"Comput. Netw."},{"key":"ref_24","unstructured":"EOS (2018, March 16). IO, EOS.IO Technical White Paper v2. Available online: https:\/\/github.com\/EOSIO\/Documentation\/blob\/master\/TechnicalWhite-Paper.md."},{"key":"ref_25","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"279","DOI":"10.1007\/BF00992698","article-title":"Q-learning","volume":"8","author":"Watkins","year":"1992","journal-title":"Mach. Learn."},{"key":"ref_26","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"529","DOI":"10.1038\/nature14236","article-title":"Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning","volume":"518","author":"Mnih","year":"2015","journal-title":"Nature"},{"key":"ref_27","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"54478","DOI":"10.1109\/ACCESS.2021.3070555","article-title":"A Survey on the Integration of Blockchain With IoT to Enhance Performance and Eliminate Challenges","volume":"9","author":"Sadawi","year":"2021","journal-title":"IEEE Access"},{"key":"ref_28","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"11463","DOI":"10.1109\/JIOT.2021.3051323","article-title":"Privacy-Preserving Transactive Energy Management for IoT-Aided Smart Homes via Blockchain","volume":"8","author":"Yang","year":"2021","journal-title":"IEEE Internet Things J."},{"key":"ref_29","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"6487","DOI":"10.1109\/JIOT.2021.3051923","article-title":"Modeling and Analysis of Data Trading on Blockchain-Based Market in IoT Networks","volume":"8","author":"Nguyen","year":"2021","journal-title":"IEEE Internet Things J."},{"key":"ref_30","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Cao, B., Liu, W., and Peng, M. (2022). Integration of MEC and Blockchain. Wireless Blockchain: Principles, Technologies and Applications IEEE, Wiley.","DOI":"10.1002\/9781119790839.ch7"},{"key":"ref_31","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"8050","DOI":"10.1109\/TVT.2019.2924015","article-title":"Online Deep Reinforcement Learning for Computation Offloading in Blockchain-Empowered Mobile Edge Computing","volume":"68","author":"Qiu","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol."},{"key":"ref_32","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1689","DOI":"10.1109\/TWC.2019.2956519","article-title":"Adaptive Resource Allocation in Future Wireless Networks With Blockchain and Mobile Edge Computing","volume":"19","author":"Guo","year":"2020","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Wirel. Commun."},{"key":"ref_33","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"30","DOI":"10.1109\/MNET.011.2000144","article-title":"Exploiting 5G and Blockchain for Medical Applications of Drones","volume":"35","author":"Chen","year":"2021","journal-title":"IEEE Netw."},{"key":"ref_34","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"44","DOI":"10.1109\/MNET.011.2000154","article-title":"Analysis of Using Blockchain to Protect the Privacy of Drone Big Data","volume":"35","author":"Lv","year":"2021","journal-title":"IEEE Netw."},{"key":"ref_35","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"3676","DOI":"10.1109\/JIOT.2018.2890213","article-title":"BBARS: Blockchain-Based Anonymous Rewarding Scheme for V2G Networks","volume":"6","author":"Wang","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Internet Things J."},{"key":"ref_36","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Gu, W., Li, J., and Tang, Z. (2021, January 28\u201330). A Survey on Consensus Mechanisms for Blockchain Technology. Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Algorithms, Xi\u2019an, China.","DOI":"10.1109\/CAIBDA53561.2021.00017"},{"key":"ref_37","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Mingxiao, D., Xiaofeng, M., Zhe, Z., Xiangwei, W., and Qijun, C. (2017, January 5\u20138). A review on consensus algorithm of blockchain. Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE international conference on systems, man, and cybernetics (SMC), Banff, AB, Canada.","DOI":"10.1109\/SMC.2017.8123011"},{"key":"ref_38","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"398","DOI":"10.1145\/571637.571640","article-title":"Practical Byzantine fault tolerance and proactive recovery","volume":"20","author":"Castro","year":"2002","journal-title":"ACM Trans. Comput. Syst."},{"key":"ref_39","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"80559","DOI":"10.1109\/ACCESS.2021.3085405","article-title":"On Performance of PBFT Blockchain Consensus Algorithm for IoT-Applications With Constrained Devices","volume":"9","author":"Meshcheryakov","year":"2021","journal-title":"IEEE Access"},{"key":"ref_40","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1146","DOI":"10.1109\/TPDS.2020.3042392","article-title":"A Scalable Multi-Layer PBFT Consensus for Blockchain","volume":"32","author":"Li","year":"2021","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst."},{"key":"ref_41","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"118541","DOI":"10.1109\/ACCESS.2019.2935149","article-title":"Delegated Proof of Stake With Downgrade: A Secure and Efficient Blockchain Consensus Algorithm With Downgrade Mechanism","volume":"7","author":"Yang","year":"2019","journal-title":"IEEE Access"},{"key":"ref_42","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"528","DOI":"10.1109\/JSAC.2005.862421","article-title":"On the optimality of multiantenna broadcast scheduling using zero-forcing beamforming","volume":"24","author":"Yoo","year":"2006","journal-title":"IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun."},{"key":"ref_43","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1436","DOI":"10.1109\/TCOMM.2013.020413.110848","article-title":"Energy and spectral efficiency of very large multiuser mimo systems","volume":"61","author":"Ngo","year":"2013","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Wirel. Commun."},{"key":"ref_44","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1265","DOI":"10.1109\/TVT.2011.2112786","article-title":"Effect of feedback delay on amplify-and-forward relay networks with beamforming","volume":"60","author":"Suraweera","year":"2011","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol."},{"key":"ref_45","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2510","DOI":"10.1109\/JSAC.2015.2478718","article-title":"Dream: Dynamic resource and task allocation for energy minimization in mobile cloud systems","volume":"33","author":"Kwak","year":"2015","journal-title":"IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun."},{"key":"ref_46","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"203","DOI":"10.1007\/BF01130406","article-title":"Processor design for portable systems","volume":"13","author":"Burd","year":"1996","journal-title":"J. VLSI Signal Process. Syst. Signal Image Video Technol."},{"key":"ref_47","unstructured":"Miettinen, A.P., and Nurminen, J.K. (2010). Energy efficiency of mobile clients in cloud computing. HotCloud, 10."},{"key":"ref_48","first-page":"619","article-title":"Variability and mutability","volume":"76","author":"Gini","year":"1913","journal-title":"J. R. Stat. Soc."},{"key":"ref_49","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1275","DOI":"10.1109\/TII.2017.2757842","article-title":"Data-driven coherency identification for generators based on spectral clustering","volume":"14","author":"Lin","year":"2018","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Ind. Inform."},{"key":"ref_50","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Dai, L., Jia, Y., Liang, L., and Chang, Z. (2017, January 11\u201313). Metric and control of system fairness in heterogeneous networks. Proceedings of the 23rd Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications, Perth, Australia.","DOI":"10.23919\/APCC.2017.8304079"},{"key":"ref_51","unstructured":"Clement, A., Wong, E., Alvisi, L., and Dahlin., M. (2009, January 22\u201324). Making Byzantine fault tolerant systems tolerate Byzantine faults. Proceedings of the Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, Boston, MA, USA."},{"key":"ref_52","unstructured":"Bagaria, V., Kannan, S., Tse, D., Fanti, G., and Viswanath, P. (2019). Deconstructing the Blockchain to Approach Physical Limits. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_53","unstructured":"Lillicrap, T.P., Hunt, J.J., Pritzel, A., Heess, N., Erez, T., Tassa, Y., Silver, D., and Wierstra, D. (2016, January 2\u20134). Continuous control with deep reinforcement learning. Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), San Juan, Puerto Rico."},{"key":"ref_54","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Tse, D., and Viswanath, P. (2005). Fundamentals of Wireless Communication, Cambridge University Press.","DOI":"10.1017\/CBO9780511807213"},{"key":"ref_55","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"712","DOI":"10.1287\/opre.1070.0445","article-title":"Relaxations of weakly coupled stochastic dynamic programs","volume":"56","author":"Adelman","year":"2008","journal-title":"Oper. Res."},{"key":"ref_56","unstructured":"Mart\u0131n, A., and Ashish, A. (2015, November 09). TensorFlow: Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems. Available online: https:\/\/www.tensorflow.org\/."},{"key":"ref_57","unstructured":"Kingma, D.P., and Adam, J.B. (2014). A method for stochastic optimization. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_58","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"823","DOI":"10.1103\/PhysRev.36.823","article-title":"On the theory of the brownian motion","volume":"36","author":"Uhlenbeck","year":"1930","journal-title":"Phys. Rev."},{"key":"ref_59","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"6214","DOI":"10.1109\/JIOT.2019.2961707","article-title":"Cooperative Computation Offloading and Resource Allocation for Blockchain-Enabled Mobile-Edge Computing: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach","volume":"7","author":"Feng","year":"2020","journal-title":"IEEE Internet Things J."}],"container-title":["Sensors"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1424-8220\/22\/9\/3217\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,10]],"date-time":"2025-10-10T22:58:53Z","timestamp":1760137133000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1424-8220\/22\/9\/3217"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2022,4,22]]},"references-count":59,"journal-issue":{"issue":"9","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,5]]}},"alternative-id":["s22093217"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/s22093217","relation":{},"ISSN":["1424-8220"],"issn-type":[{"value":"1424-8220","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2022,4,22]]}}}