Multi-Stakeholder Service Placement via Iterative Bargaining With Incomplete Information

Mobile edge computing based on cloudlets is an emerging paradigm to improve service quality by bringing computation and storage facilities closer to end users and reducing operating cost for infrastructure providers (IPs) and service providers (SPs). To maximize their individual benefits, IP and SP have to reach an agreement about placing and executing services on particular cloudlets. We show that a Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS) yields the optimal solution with respect to social cost and fairness if IP and SP have complete information about the parameters of their mutual cost functions. However, IP and SP might not be willing or able to share all information due to business secrets or technical limitations. Therefore, we present a novel iterative bargaining approach without complete mutual information to achieve substantial cost reductions for both IP and SP. Furthermore, we investigate how different degrees of information sharing impact social cost and fairness of the different approaches. Our evaluation based on the mobile augmented reality game Ingress shows that our approach achieves up to about 82% of the cost reduction that the NBS achieves and a cost reduction of up to 147% compared to traditional Take-it-or-Leave-it approaches, despite incomplete information.