Contract-based Cooperative Computation and Communication Resources Sharing in Mobile Edge Computing

In this paper, we consider a Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) system with a source transmitter (ST) and multiple relay nodes (RNs). ST has sufficient computing resources, but lacks communication ability, while the situation of RN is the opposite. To tackle this resource imbalance problem, we propose a cooperative computation and communication resources sharing strategy using contract theory under complete and incomplete information scenarios. The ST offers a contract combining computation time and relay power, and the RNs forward the computational results for ST in exchange for the usage of computation capacity. For complete information scenario, we derive the optimal contract to maximize the ST’s utility and we show the existence and uniqueness of optimal contract. We further explore the properties of a feasible contract for incomplete information scenario where the channel gain and relay cost are the private information of RNs and not known by ST. We analyze the necessary and sufficient conditions for a contract to be feasible and propose a sequence optimization algorithm to obtain the optimal contract. Finally, we show the feasibility and optimality of the contract through simulation results.