Edge In-Network Computing Meets Blockchain: A Multi-Domain Heterogeneous Resource Trust Management Architecture

In-network computing indicates the convergence of computing and network, which can be further considered as computing-based networking and network-enabled computing, from which comes the edge in-network computing paradigm. In this newly proposed paradigm, the computing, caching, and communication resources are deployed on in-transit edge nodes, such as routers or switches; hence, services are provided with less delay and energy consumption by the deep aggregation of edge-side resources. However, open challenges still exist in dealing with heterogeneous resource sharing, scheduling, and ensuring credibility of service processing. Given this background, this article aims to address the edge-side heterogeneous resource trust management in multi-domain scenarios. A multi-domain heterogeneous resource trust management architecture is first constructed to achieve trusted resource sharing and transaction. Then, under the proposed architecture, a smart-contract-based resource sharing mechanism is formulated, including an incentive mechanism based on end-side node contribution. Furthermore, a differential-evolution-enabled containerized microservice orchestration algorithm is finally designed to minimize operation delay and load imbalance during the container deployment. The application of this platform in a highly elastic power grid scenario has been tested as an example.