Distributed Game-Theoretical Task Offloading for Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has been envisioned as a promising distributed computing paradigm, where mobile users offload their tasks to edge nodes to decrease the cost of energy and computation. However, most existing works only consider the congestion of wireless channels as the crucial factor influencing the strategy-making process, and ignore the impact of the offloading among edge nodes. In addition, centralized task offloading strategies result in heavy computation complexity in center nodes. Along this line, we take both the congestion of wireless channels and the offloading among multiple edge nodes into consideration to enrich users’ offloading strategies. To this end, we first formulate the offloading problem as a multi-user potential game, and then propose a distributed task offloading algorithm to reach an equilibrium state which can also protect individual privacy. Specifically, in the above task offloading algorithm, we propose two subalgorithms to select users for updating strategies: Parallel User Selection Algorithm (PUS) and Single User Selection Algorithm (SUS) in order to substantially accelerate the convergence. Extensive experiments on three real-world data sets validate that the proposed algorithm achieves a Nash equilibrium and effectively decreases the total user cost which is acceptable compared to the optimal solution.