Cooperative Offloading Based on Online Auction for Mobile Edge Computing

In the field of edge computing, collaborative computing offloading, in which edge users offload tasks to adjacent mobile devices with rich resources in an opportunistic manner, provides a promising example to meet the requirements of low latency. However, most of the previous work has been based on the assumption that these mobile devices are willing to serve edge users, with no incentive strategy. In this paper, an online auction-based strategy is proposed, in which both users and mobile devices can interact dynamically with the system. The auction strategy proposed in this paper is based on an online approach to optimize the long-term utility of the system, such as start time, length and size, resource requirements, and evaluation valuation, without knowing the future. Experiments verify that the proposed online auction strategy achieves the expected attributes such as individual rationality, authenticity and computational ease of handling. In addition, the index of theoretical competitive ratio also indicates that the proposed online mechanism realizes near-offline optimal long-term utility performance.