Profit aware Resource Allocation in Fog Computing: A Stackelberg Game Approach

Recently, Internet of Things (IoT) based smart systems have led to more latency-sensitive and bandwidth hungry IoT applications. Fog computing as an extension of Cloud computing fulfills those requirements more effectively. However, a key challenge for the fog computing is multiple resources allocation between heterogeneous Data Service Operators (DSOs) and End Users (EUs). The DSOs want to increase their revenues, however, due to lack of efficient resource allocation mechanisms, they often end up compromising Quality of Service (QoS) and violating Service Level Agreements (SLAs). It is very important for them to make a balance among user's expectations, expenses of providers and penalties for not providing services within the deadline. Hence, a profit-aware resource allocation policy using Stackelberg game is proposed in the work where DSO acts as leaders and EU as followers. The DSOs being the leaders, set the prices first, send it to the followers, and then the followers can compute their best demand for resources accordingly. Next, Stackelberg equilibrium for each type of resource is obtained to find the best resource demand strategy for an EU. The simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm.