Cloud Mining Pool Aided Blockchain-Enabled Internet of Things: An Evolutionary Game Approach

The past few years have witnessed an exponential growth of diverse Internet of Things (IoT) devices as well as compelling applications ranging from industrial production to medical care. Dramatic advances in IoT technology not only brought enormous economic opportunities but also challenges (e.g., privacy and security vulnerabilities). Recently, with the appearance of blockchain technology, the integration of IoT and blockchain (BCoT) is considered a promising solution to address these issues. Blockchain provides a secure and scalable data management framework for IoT devices. However, the huge computation and energy cost of the consensus process in blockchain prevents it from being directly applied as a generic platform. To overcome this challenge, in this article, we propose a cloud mining pool-aided BCoT architecture, where the IoT devices can rent the computing resources from the cloud mining pools to offload the mining process. Based on this architecture, we study the mining pool selection problem and analyze the colony behaviors of IoT devices with different pooling strategies. We propose a centralized evolutionary game-based pool selection algorithm for the sake of maximizing the system utility. Considering the non-cooperative relationship among multiple miners, we also propose a lightweight distributed reinforcement learning algorithm, named the ‘WoLF-PHC’ algorithm.