Task Offloading and Dispatching for MEC with Selfish Mobile Devices and Access Points

Abstract

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) comes forth as a promising computing paradigm to meet the low-delay requirements of computation-intensive applications. In this work, we focus on the task offloading and dispatching problem in MEC, where mobile devices (MDs) can decide to execute tasks locally or offload them to access points (APs), and each AP can dispatch its received tasks to other APs. Specially, we consider both APs and MDs are selfish, which aim to minimize their respective task completion delay. The problem is particularly difficult, as there exists computing resource competition among MDs and APs, respectively. Furthermore, the offloading decisions made by MDs and the dispatching decisions made by APs are interactive. To overcome the challenges, we first formulate the problem as a multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game, and rigorously prove the existence of a Stackelberg equilibrium. Then, we propose an efficient approach to achieve a Stackelberg equilibrium, which includes a Q-learning based offloading strategy for MDs and a best response based dispatching strategy for APs. We also demonstrate an upper bound of the total completion delay achieved by our approach with a constant approximation ratio. Extensive simulations are also conducted to show the performance of our approach, compared with baselines.