A Bargaining Approach for Service Placement in Multi-Access Edge Computing With Information Asymmetries

Multi-access edge computing (MEC) refers to deploying computation resources, known as cloudlets or edge servers, near the edge of the mobile network. Services like augmented reality (AR) benefit from MEC by service placement, which refers to installing service-specific software and allocating resources on cloudlets. Service placement in MEC improves service quality and potentially reduces costs compared to centralized cloud computing approaches. The main stakeholders in MEC are infrastructure providers (IPs), who manage the MEC infrastructure, and service providers (SPs), who offer services to users. Both have unique technical and economic perspectives, such as resource demands, resource availability, and costs. Information asymmetries exist as only IPs have access to information about their resources, and only SPs have information about service usage and resource demands. This work addresses challenges of service placement in MEC from a multi-stakeholder, techno-economic perspective. We introduce a model including the stakeholders’ technical and economic goals and information asymmetries. To solve this problem efficiently, we propose a multi-stakeholder bargaining mechanism, termed Nash Backward Induction with Linear Equilibrium Strategies (NBI-LES). In a case study with 544 users and 16 SPs, we achieve $\text{79}{\%}$ of the optimal reduction in traffic given by a centralized optimal service placement strategy.