Trading off Between Multi-Tenancy and Interference: A Service User Allocation Game

Edge computing, as an emerging and prospective distributed computing paradigm, allows a service provider to serve its users by allocating them to nearby edge servers delivering services with low latency. From the service provider’s perspective, a cost-effective service user allocation aims to allocate maximum service users to minimum edge servers. Such an allocation leverages multi-tenancy to reduce the resources hired by the service provider for serving the service users. However, the allocation of excessive service users to an edge server may result in severe interference and consequently impact their data rates. There is a trade-off between multi-tenancy and interference in the pursuit of a cost-effective service user allocation. In this article, we formally model this service user allocation (SUA) problem, and prove that it is NP-hard to find the optimal solution to an SUA problem. To solve the SUA problem effectively and efficiently, we propose a game-theoretic approach, namely MI-SUAGame, to formulate the SUA problem as a potential game. We analyze the game and prove its admission to a Nash equilibrium. Then, a novel decentralized algorithm is designed for finding a Nash equilibrium in the game as the solution to the SUA problem. The performance of MI-SUAGame is theoretically analyzed and experimentally evaluated against the state-of-the-art approach. The results show that it can solve the SUA problem effectively and efficiently.