Dewing in Fog: Incentive-Aware Micro Computing Cluster Formation for Fog Computing

Abstract

Fog computing is envisioned as a promising approach for supporting emerging mission-critical applications on capacity and battery constrained mobile devices. By harvesting and collaborating a massive crowd of devices in close proximity for computation and communication resource sharing, it enables significant potentials in low-latency and energy-efficient mobile task execution. It is readily acknowledged, however, that without an efficient incentive mechanism that stimulates resources sharing among devices, the benefits of fog computing cannot be fully realized. Leveraging coalitional game theory, this work presents an efficient incentive mechanism to incentivize mutually-beneficial resource cooperation among the devices for collaborative task execution. Specially, to prevent the over-exploiting and free-riding behaviors that harm resource-rich device's willingness to collaborate, the proposed mechanism groups the devices into multiple micro computing clusters (MC-C). Within each MCC, devices can exchange mutually beneficial actions by helping to compute or transmit tasks, making all of them better off. The solution of the MCC formation is devised by a network-assisted mechanism, which is further proven to admit nice properties such as top coalition and core solution.