Data offloading in mobile edge computing: A coalitional game based pricing approach

TL;DR

This paper proposes a coalitional game based pricing scheme for data offloading in mobile edge computing, optimizing interactions between mobile devices and MEC servers to improve utility performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel coalitional game model for data offloading in MEC, incorporating pricing strategies to incentivize cooperation between devices and servers.

Findings

Utility performance improves under the proposed scheme.

The core of the game is analyzed for stability.

Scenario simulations validate the approach.

Abstract

Mobile edge computing (MEC), affords service to the vicinity of mobile devices (MDs), has become a key technology for future network. Offloading big data to the MEC server for preprocessing is a attractive choice of MDs. In the paper, we investigate data offloading from MDs to MEC servers. A coalitional game based pricing scheme is proposed. We apply coalitional game to depict the offloading relationship between MDs and MEC servers, and utilize pricing as the stimuli for the offloading. A scheduled MD chooses one MEC server within the same coalition for offloading, and pays the selected MEC server for the MEC service. We formulate a coalitional game, where MDs and MEC servers are players and their utilities are respectively defined. Next, we analyze the formulated game. Specially, the core is studied. Finally, utility performance of the proposed scheme under the 2-MD and 2-MEC- server scenario are demonstrated.