Data Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing: A Coalition and Pricing Based Approach

Mobile edge computing (MEC) that affords service to the vicinity of mobile devices (MDs) has become a key technology for future network. Offloading big data to the MEC server for preprocessing is an attractive approach of MDs. In this paper, we investigate data offloading from MDs to MEC servers, and a coalitional game-based pricing scheme is proposed. We apply coalitions to arrange data offloading of MDs as well as depict the offloading relationship between MDs and MEC servers. Furthermore, pricing is utilized as the stimuli for the offloading. In the proposed scheme, a scheduled MD in a coalition chooses an MEC server within the same coalition for offloading, and pays the selected MEC server for the MEC service. By analyzing the formulated coalitional non-transferable utility game, theoretical properties are derived and sufficient conditions for the core existence are given. Finally, the utility performances of the proposed scheme are demonstrated by numerical results.