Stackelberg-Game-Based Intelligent Offloading Incentive Mechanism for a Multi-UAV-Assisted Mobile-Edge Computing System

Abstract

We study the intelligent offloading problem for a multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (multi-UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) system in a MEC scenario where a natural disaster has damaged the edge server. The study has two steps. First, the task offloading destination is determined by minimizing the total energy consumption of the multiple UAVs in the system. We propose the server selection game-theoretic (SSGT) algorithm and demonstrate its convergence through simulation experiments. Second, we propose an offloading incentive mechanism to price computing resources for a single UAV-MEC server. Considering the UAV’s power consumption and mobile users’ willingness, we model the interaction between the UAV-MEC server and mobile users as a Stackelberg game. We prove the existence of a Nash equilibrium by theoretical analysis and experimental verification and design the multi-round iterative game (MRIG) algorithm based on arithmetic descent to achieve the optimal solution, i.e., the utility tradeoff between the UAV-MEC server and mobile users. Finally, the simulation results show that our proposed scheme can increase the value of overall user satisfaction (SoU) more than other schemes, which proves that the incentive mechanism of resource pricing can supply computing power support for ground mobile users in a UAV-assisted MEC system more effectively.