Coalition and Pricing Based Data Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) that affords service to the vicinity of mobile devices (MDs) has become a key technology for future network. In this paper, we investigate data offloading from MDs to MEC servers, and a coalitional game based pricing scheme is proposed. 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. 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. Theoretical properties are derived and sufficient conditions for the core existence are given by analyzing the formulated coalitional non-transferable utility (NTU) game. Finally, the utility performances of the proposed scheme are demonstrated by numerical results.