Joint Network Slicing and Computation Offloading for Multi-Access Edge Computing: A Bi-Level Game Approach

One of the key challenges faced by 5G-Advanced and the forthcoming 6G networks is the provisioning of delay-critical services. Recently, the integration of network slicing and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is regarded as a promising solution for this challenge. However, existing proposals for the integration are far from perfect with various drawbacks, such as rigid slicing, privacy leakage, and high signaling costs. In this paper, we investigate the problem of joint network slicing and computation offloading, which is formulated as a multi-leader-disjoint-follower Stackelberg game. We prove that the game is a potential game which has at least one global Nash Equilibrium (gNE). Then we propose a distributed algorithm that provably converges to a gNE of the game without revealing any private information of all stakeholders. The performance of our proposed algorithm is evaluated through simulations, which demonstrate that the algorithm converges to the gNE rapidly and outperforms a number of benchmark algorithms.