A Mobile Edge Computing and Blockchain Framework for Secure Cross-Island Critical Mineral Traceability

Abstract

Cloud-based traceability systems depend on continuous connectivity, limiting their reliability in geographically dispersed mineral supply chains where prolonged network outages may occur. This study proposes an offline-first architecture integrating Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) with a permissioned blockchain for secure cross-island critical-mineral traceability. Traceability events generated at mines, transport routes, ports, vessels, warehouses, and processing facilities are locally validated, digitally signed, encrypted, and queued at MEC gateways during connectivity loss before synchronization with the blockchain. The framework was evaluated using 12,384 synthetic traceability events derived from a critical-minerals dataset and six simulated attack categories. After a 24-hour outage, the proposed framework maintained 98.7% record completeness compared with 58.2% for the cloud-only baseline. It achieved an average attack-detection rate of 98.5% and reduced post-outage synchronization delay from 466 sec to 185 sec. These findings demonstrate the potential of an offline-first MEC blockchain architecture to improve traceability continuity, tamper detection, and shared verification in critical-mineral supply chains operating under intermittent connectivity.