Coalitional Game-Theoretical Approach to Coinvestment with Application to Edge Computing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a coalitional game-theoretic framework for co-investment in edge computing resources, enabling stakeholders to fairly share costs and profits despite high CAPEX barriers.

Contribution

It formalizes a novel coalitional game model for edge computing co-investment, proving convexity and deriving a fair payoff distribution using the Shapley value.

Findings

The game is proven to be convex, ensuring the formation of the grand coalition.

A fair profit-sharing solution is derived using the Shapley value.

Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Abstract

We propose in this paper a coinvestment plan between several stakeholders of different types, namely a physical network owner, operating network nodes, e.g. a network operator or a tower company, and a set of service providers willing to use these resources to provide services as video streaming, augmented reality, autonomous driving assistance, etc. One such scenario is that of deployment of Edge Computing resources. Indeed, although the latter technology is ready, the high Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) cost of such resources is the barrier to its deployment. For this reason, a solid economical framework to guide the investment and the returns of the stakeholders is key to solve this issue. We formalize the coinvestment framework using coalitional game theory. We provide a solution to calculate how to divide the profits and costs among the stakeholders, taking into account their characteristics: traffic load, revenues, utility function. We prove that it is always possible to form the grand coalition composed of all the stakeholders, by showing that our game is convex. We derive the payoff of the stakeholders using the Shapley value concept, and elaborate on some properties of our game. We show our solution in simulation.