Contract-Matching Incentive Mechanism for UAV-Assisted Mobile Edge Computing

In the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted edge computing networks, the UAVs act as mobile edge nodes to provide flexible communication and computation services to user equipment (UE). To enable efficient resource trading between the UAV and UE, it is of paramount importance to design an incentive mechanism that compensates for the costs of the UAVs, while preventing the UAVs from falsely reporting their private resource information. To address this issue, we propose a contract-matching integrated incentive mechanism in a multi-UAV and multi-UE network, where the UEs are unaware of the UAVs’ locations and computation frequencies. To deal with the asymmetric information, we employ contract theory to maximize each UE’s expected utility while encouraging the UAVs to truthfully participate in the edge computing service. Then, we adopt the Gale-Shapley algorithm to establish the one-to-one association between UAVs and UEs. Finally, simulation results validate that our proposed mechanism can achieve individual rationality, incentive compatibility, and improve UEs’ average utility compared with the benchmark algorithm.