Profit Maximization Incentive Mechanism for Resource Providers in Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has become a promising technique to accommodate demands of resource-constrained mobile devices by offloading the task onto edge clouds nearby. However, most existing works only focus on whether to offload or where to offload the task but ignore the motivations of edge clouds to offer service. To stimulate service provisioning by edge clouds, it is essential to design an incentive mechanism that charges mobile devices and rewards edge clouds. In this paper, we first propose an incentive mechanism in a non-competitive environment. We utilize market-based profit maximization pricing model to establish the relationship between the resources provided by edge clouds and the price charged to mobile devices. By solving the optimization problem, we provide a reasonable pricing strategy to not only ensure the profit of resource providers but guarantee the quality of experience (QoE) of mobile devices. Furthermore, we design an online profit maximization multi-round auction (PMMRA) mechanism for the resource trading between edge clouds as sellers and mobile devices as buyers in a competitive environment. The mechanism can effectively determine the price paid by buyers to use the resources provided by sellers and make the corresponding match between edge clouds and mobile devices. Finally, numerical results show that proposed mechanism outperforms other existing algorithms in maximizing the profit of edge clouds.