IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - January/February 2024 - 28

Special Section on Security and Privacy-Aware Emerging Computing
CHALLENGES AND FUTURE
DIRECTIONS
The existing research on securing the CEI with
blockchain faces numerous challenges due to the
diverse characteristics of all the involved entities.
In addition to network overhead, scalability,
interoperability, and technical validation based
on real implementations, some of the other challenges
that are also considered as future works
are briefly discussed in the following.
Dynamic environment: As discussed previously,
some edge devices are mobile in nature,
which indicates that the nearby fog nodes of
such devices will change over time. This introduces
another level of complexity from constructing
the data payload to updating the
blockchainwith thenew fognodes'ID. Furthermore,
the fog nodes need to process the data
payloads of edge devices with highmobility.
Validation rate: Some edge devices may send
the data payload faster than the rate at which
the fog nodes would be able to update the
blockchain. In other words, the fog nodes
need to execute Steps 5 and 6, as shown in
Figure 5, at a very high speed taking minimal
time to process the data payload. To mitigate
such an issue, the research must focus on
designing a lightweight consensus algorithm
and block validation mechanism for the fog
nodes.
Computation overhead: The nearby fog nodes
are now responsible for both carrying out
complex edge analytics and maintaining
the blockchain for all the edge devices in
their communication range. This introduces
a computation overhead on the fog nodes
demanding higher computation resources
and an efficient lightweight consensus algorithm
and block validation mechanism.
Communication overhead: The edge devices
need to constantly share the surrounding data
and their knowledge with peers, attracting
communication overhead on the network.
This also impacts the power-constraint edge
device as such edge devices need to transmit
additional data with peers and fog nodes. To
handle such power-constraint edge devices, it
is necessary to strategically construct and
broadcast the data payload based on the
power available with the device.
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Scalability: One of the most challenging jobs is
ensuring that the proposed CEI supports an
ever-increasing number of edge devices. Scaling
up the CEI infrastructure will significantly
impact the communication overhead and the
computation overhead to the fog nodes. With
the constant addition of a large number of
edge devices, the newly constructed data payloads
and blockchain need to be validated
and updated at a higher rate. One possible
solution would be to design a lightweight consensus
algorithm and block validation mechanism
for the fog nodes.
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKS
This article addresses the security aspect of
CEI, where the primary goal is to keep the events
history intact and traceable. Events history analysis
is required when it comes to find the cause
of unexpected failure in edge intelligence or the
reason behind the events. Blockchain technology
can address this issue, by enabling the event
to be immutable. As discussed, the edge devices
are primarily responsible for building the data
payload, which is the basic blockchain unit.
Nearby fog nodes are mainly responsible for constructing
and updating the blockchain. Once the
blockchain is updated, it is hard for any system
or intruder to modify the events chain, as the
nonce/PoW is laborious to recalculate.
This article also summarizes some of the significant
challenges, which are also part of the
future works. We envision integrating advanced
blockchain-based technology with the edge
infrastructure will result in a more efficient and
transparent secured CEI.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank financial
support to the UoH-IoE by MHRD, India (F11/9/
2019-U3(A)).
&REFERENCES
1. T. Rausch and S. Dustdar, " Edge intelligence: The
convergence of humans, things, and AI, " in Proc. IEEE
Int. Conf. Cloud Eng., 2019, pp. 86-96, doi: 10.1109/
IC2E.2019.00022.
IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine
https://doi.org/10.1109/IC2E.2019.00022 https://doi.org/10.1109/IC2E.2019.00022
IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - January/February 2024

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