Multi-User Computation Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing: A Behavioral Perspective

By providing cloud computing capabilities at the network edge in proximity of mobile device users, mobile edge computing offers an effective solution to help mobile devices with computation-intensive and delay-sensitive tasks. In this article, we investigate the multi-user computation offloading problem in an uncertain wireless environment. Most of the existing works assume that mobile device users are rational and make offloading decisions to maximize their expected objective utilities. However, in practice, users tend to have subjective perceptions under uncertainty, such that their behavior deviates considerably from the conventional rationality assumption. Drawing on the framework of prospect theory (PT), we formulate users' decision making of whether to offload or not as a PT-based non-cooperative game. We propose a distributed computation offloading algorithm to achieve the Nash equilibrium of the game. Numerical results assess the impact of mobile device users' behavioral biases on offloading decision making.