Signaling-Based Incentive Mechanism for D2D Computation Offloading

Due to the limited computing capacity in mobile devices, device-to-device (D2D) computation offloading has been proposed as a promising solution to improving the quality of service in the Internet of Things (IoT) networks, by allowing mobile devices to exploit spare computing resources in nearby user devices. However, a major challenge to realizing this new paradigm is how to effectively motivate user devices to participate as computation providers (CPs) for computation requesters (CRs), which is further exacerbated by the fact that user incentives are usually coupled with information asymmetry between the network operator and user devices. This has not been sufficiently studied for D2D computation offloading. In this article, we propose a signaling-based incentive mechanism that leverages contract theory to address information asymmetry for D2D computation offloading. Based on the proposed contract-based incentive mechanism, we also solve the many-to-many CP-CR pairing problem by devising a polynomial-complexity matching scheme. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can effectively motivate user devices to participate in D2D computation offloading and select the most appropriate CPs to perform the computation tasks for corresponding CRs.