Gamified incentive sharing mechanism of edge computing among edge service providers

Abstract

Edge computing is important for the efficiency of an entire system. It makes the Internet of Things technologies more sustainable and improves users' experience and satisfaction. Generally, owing to the heterogeneity of edge servers, computing resources are unbalanced, resulting in energy wastage. Existing studies, however, have only focused on incentive mechanisms for edge collaboration; therefore, the willingness of edge servers to share resources needs further exploration. Furthermore, few studies have considered more than one edge service provider (ESP) in the incentive mechanism, which is unsustainable for selfish ESPs to optimize their computing resource allocation process. To deal with this issue, a gamified process is introduced into edge computing. Then, a system throughput maximization problem is proposed to utilize idle resources through gamification-based edge cooperation. This is proven to be a non-deterministic polynomial-time hard problem. To resolve this problem, a greedy algorithm is proposed. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm improves the throughput by ranges of [36.9%, 87.2%] and [10.0%, 13.1%] when compared with that from no gamification and an existing greedy algorithm, respectively, when considering the influential factors. The proposed gamified mechanism helps to improve system efficiency by reducing idle computing resources and motivating ESPs to process share during production, which further enhances the smart utilization of limited global resources.