Selfish Decentralized Computation Offloading for Mobile Cloud Computing in Dense Wireless Networks

Offloading computation to a mobile cloud is a promising solution to augment the computation capabilities of mobile devices. In this paper, we consider selfish mobile devices in a dense wireless network, in which individual mobile devices can offload computations through multiple access points or through the base station to a mobile cloud so as to minimize their computation costs. We provide a game theoretical analysis of the problem, prove the existence of pure strategy Nash equilibria, and provide an efficient decentralized algorithm for computing an equilibrium. For the case when the cloud computing resources scale with the number of mobile devices, we show that all improvement paths are finite. Furthermore, we provide an upper bound on the price of anarchy of the game, which serves as an upper bound on the approximation ratio of the proposed decentralized algorithms. We use simulations to evaluate the time complexity of computing Nash equilibria and to provide insights into the price of anarchy of the game under realistic scenarios. Our results show that the equilibrium cost may be close to optimal, and the convergence time is almost linear in the number of mobile devices.