Abstract
With the rapid developing of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, various kinds of IoT devices are connected over the Internet. Consequently, how to meet the requirements of executing IoT applications is becoming a critical issue. Offloading the IoT applications to the public cloud is an efficient approach to enhance the computing capabilities of these IoT devices. However, as there is a long distance from the IoT devices to the remote public cloud, transmission delay will be caused. Mobile edge computing (MEC) provides an effective solution to this issue since IoT devices are near to the servers of the MEC systems. Pricing and load balancing are two important factors for cloud service provision. Pricing is of paramount importance for cloud service provision, and load balancing is fully considered when cloud users select an edge cloud service provider (ESP) as it has a direct relation with the quality of cloud service. In multi-cloud systems, a cloud service broker (CSB) reserves cloud resources from multiple CSPs to provision cloud services to users. While existing work has put a lot of attention on IoT applications offloading to the MEC, many of them only considered one edge cloud scenario, ignoring the multi-MEC scenario. In this article, we investigate service pricing and selection for IoT applications offloading in a multi-MEC system with multiple ESPs. Specifically, we take load balancing into account. The studied problem is formulated as a Stackelberg game, where CSB first sets service price and load balancing strategies for the cloud services trying to get its maximized revenue. Then, IoT users make their decisions on which ESP they select service. By applying the backward induction approach, the optimal solutions are derived. The proposed scheme is verified through simulation results.
Highlights
In the recent years, Internet of Things (IoT) has been attracted a great deal of attention in the academic and industrial fields
In the first stage, based on service prices and load balancing indicators that set by the cloud service broker (CSB), we study how IoT users make their determinations on which edge cloud service provider (ESP)’s cloud service should be selected and the number of application requests they generate
The value of λ denotes the number of application requests. r is the reward of this IoT user obtained from using services, which is directly related with the data size of application request
Summary
Internet of Things (IoT) has been attracted a great deal of attention in the academic and industrial fields. With IoT users’ application requests for computing resources increasing dramatically, and at the same time, the applications of IoT users become more and more complex, IoT users may consider using services from different ESPs in order to meet their demands. Under this circumstance, multi-cloud systems, have emerged as practical platforms to address this problem [6]. On the IoT users’ side, based on pricing and load balancing information, they will select services from these ESPs in order to process their application requests.
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