Joint Task Offloading and Dispatching for MEC With Rational Mobile Devices and Edge Nodes

Multi-access Edge Computing has come forth as a promising paradigm to provide low-latency computing service to mobile end users. Its basic idea is to deploy computation resources at the edge of core networks such as wireless access points, and then users can offload their tasks to nearby edge nodes for processing. Plenty of works have well studied the task offloading problem, aiming to reduce task completion delays. Also, a few recent works have focused on task dispatching among edge nodes to balance their workloads and improve resource utilization. In this work, we jointly consider the task offloading and dispatching problem in an edge computing system with interconnected access points. Furthermore, we assume both end devices and access points are rational, which only care about their own benefits. To solve the joint problem, we firstly formulate it as a multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game, and rigorously prove the existence of a Stackelberg equilibrium. Then, we propose two algorithms for task offloading and dispatching, respectively. Extensive simulations are conducted to show the superiority of our proposed approach. We also demonstrate that an upper bound with a constant approximation ratio is achieved by our approach.