A Novel Smart Contract based Optimized Cloud Selection Framework for Efficient Multi-Party Computation

The industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is characterized by intelligent connection, real-time data processing, collaborative monitoring, and automatic information processing. The heterogeneous IIoT devices require a high data rate, high reliability, high coverage, and low delay, thus posing a significant challenge to information security. High-performance edge and cloud servers are a good backup solution for IIoT devices with limited capabilities. However, privacy leakage and network attack cases may occur in heterogeneous IIoT environ­ments. Cloud-based multi-party computing is a reliable privacy-protecting technology that encourages multi­party participation in joint computing without privacy disclosure. However, the default cloud selection method does not meet the heterogeneous IIoT requirements. The server can be dishonest, significantly increasing the probability of multi-party computation failure or inefficiency. This paper proposes a blockchain and smart contract-based optimized cloud node selection framework. Different participants choose the best server that meets their performance demands, considering the communication delay. Smart contracts provide a progressive request mechanism to increase participation. The simulation results show that our framework improves overall multi-party computing efficiency by up to 44.73%.