A Stackelberg game scheme for pricing and task offloading based on idle node-assisted edge computational model

Abstract

Mobile edge server (MES) can meet the low latency requirements of End user (EU) tasks, but the MES computing resources are limited. This paper proposes an IDs-assisted MES (MES-IDs) computing model to expand MES. However, how to find a task offload strategy to minimize EU calculation costs and improve MES and ID benefits on a task completion basis. This paper proposes a three-way optimization calculation method based on the Stackelberg game to reduce the problem complexity, which decomposes into EUs-BS and BS-IDs problems. The EUs-BS problem design pricing scheme obtains the EU task optimal offload rate. The BS-IDs problem uses nonlinear pricing methods to find the optimal task offload problem between MES and ID on the resource unit price, a multi-constrained nonlinear convex optimization problem. We propose an immune Metropolis-based particle swarm loss optimization algorithm (PIMA) to obtain an approximate optimal solution for the nonlinear convex optimization problem by adjusting the resource price. Numerical simulation results show that compared with GSP and PSI algorithms, the PIMA algorithm shows more robust stability and can effectively reduce task completion delay and computational cost.