Incentive Mechanism for Edge Cloud Profit Maximization in Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has become a promising technique to accommodate demands of resource-constrained mobile devices by offloading the task onto edge clouds nearby. However, most existing works only focus on whether or where a task is offloaded but ignore the motivation of the edge cloud to offer service. To stimulate service provisioning by edge clouds, it is essential to design an incentive mechanism that charges mobile devices and rewards edge clouds. In this paper, we utilize market-based pricing model to establish a relationship between the resources provided by edge clouds and the price paid by the mobile devices in a non-competitive environment. Furthermore, we design a profit maximization multi-round auction (PMMRA) mechanism for the resource trading between edge clouds as sellers and mobile devices as buyers in a competitive environment. The mechanism can effectively determine the price paid by the buyers to use the resources provided by the sellers and make the corresponding match between edge clouds and mobile devices. Finally, numerical results show that proposed mechanism outperforms other existing algorithms in maximizing the profits of resource providers.