Profit Maximization Task Offloading Mechanism with D2D Collaboration in MEC Networks

This paper investigates an optimal offloading mechanism for multi-access edge computing networks with the aid of device-to-device (D2D) communication technology. Specifically, due to the existence of idle devices in the networks, the communication tasks can be offloaded to them for fully utilizing their computing resources. Thus, in order to encourage the idle devices to join the collaboration offloading, an incentive mechanism which jointly considers the price strategy and the computing resources assignment strategy is proposed at first and a Stackelberg game-based method is proposed to achieve the price-resource equilibrium. After that, to maximize the computing profits of task publishers, the D2D collaboration task assignment problem is formulated and an optimal task assignment method based on the bipartite matching is given. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme can achieve higher computing profits compared with the benchmark schemes. Besides, our proposed scheme also demonstrates its superiority by utilizing the computing resource of idle devices.