Differential Pricing-Based Task Offloading for Delay-Sensitive IoT Applications in Mobile Edge Computing System

With the evolutionary development of the Internet of Things (IoT), the demand for delay-sensitive applications has increased. In this manner, mobile-edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a promising technology to run these applications on mobile devices. Several studies have been conducted on pricing schemes in the MEC environment, and they have focused on the amount of offloaded data in pricing. However, under the previously proposed pricing policy, the server resource usage of users is not properly reflected in the payment, so users only try to occupy the server resources as much as possible without any consideration. To solve this problem, this article newly proposes a differential pricing scheme in which the unit price per second is determined based on the user's usage of server computational resources. Also, it suggests the user's optimal offloading strategy and server's equilibrium pricing strategy by formulating Stackelberg game based on the proposed pricing scheme and execution delay. Several numerical results show that the proposed pricing scheme and strategies can solve the problems and can increase the efficiency of edge server's computational resources.