Stackelberg Game-Based Computation Offloading in Social and Cognitive Industrial Internet of Things

Relying on the computation offloading technology, edge computing has shown potential in countless tasks processing in the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), which is composed of multiple edge clouds and multiple IIoT devices. Nevertheless, with increasing demands for computation service, how to design reliable transmission mechanism and allocate proper computation resource has become bottlenecks. In this article, we propose a computation offloading mechanism based on two-stage Stackelberg game to analyze the interaction between multiple edge clouds and multiple IIoT devices. To be specific, the edge clouds are denoted as leaders who set the appropriate price for their computation resource. Besides considering the payment cost, the IIoT devices which are termed as the followers formulate their utility function by considering the social interaction information from the potential IIoT devices. The existence and uniqueness of the Stackelberg equilibrium are analyzed considering two possible cases, i.e., complete information and incomplete information. Moreover, two dynamic iterative algorithms are invoked for solving both problem models, respectively. Finally, experimental results show that our proposed scheme is conducive to seeking the appropriate price and computation requirement. Besides, social interaction information plays an important role in achieving a reasonable computation requirement for IIoT devices.