A Truthful Combinatorial Auction Mechanism Towards Mobile Edge Computing in Industrial Internet of Things

Abstract

Mobile edge computing (MEC) shows prominent application prospects in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) by allowing resource-restricted IIoT mobile devices (MDs) to offload their tasks to geographical proximity edge clouds. An efficient incentive mechanism should be designed jointly addressing resource allocation and pricing to incentivize MDs (i.e., buyers) and edge clouds (i.e., sellers) to participate in offloading service trading. This paper aims to solve the social welfare maximization problem of a personalized MEC computation offloading service market where each edge cloud can allocate different computing and wireless resources to each MD according to the MDs' delay and energy consumption constraints, and each MD submits bids to edge clouds differently based on the resource allocation of the edge clouds. We propose a truthful combinatorial auction (TCA) mechanism which involves three phases of resource allocation, buyer-seller matching, and payment determination. It should be highlighted that our proposed buyer-seller matching algorithm combines optimal matching and heuristic matching, so it greatly improves the auction effect while ensuring computational efficiency. Considerable theoretical analysis and experimental results prove that the performance of the proposed TCA mechanism is significantly superior to that of other auction mechanisms while holding the desirable properties.