Cooperative Application Execution in Mobile Cloud Computing: A Stackelberg Game Approach

In this letter, we consider the problem of cooperative application execution for mobile cloud computing. To encourage mobile devices to share their unused resources, we design an incentive scheme, which benefits both the owner of the tasks and the mobile devices participated in task execution. A Stackelberg game is then formulated to decide the price that can be offered to mobile devices for application execution and the amount of execution units that each mobile device is willing to provide. We discuss the properties of the game and show that there exists a unique Stackelberg equilibrium. Furthermore, an efficient algorithm is proposed to reach Stackelberg equilibrium of the game. Finally, we conduct simulations to evaluate the properties and effectiveness of the proposed scheme.