Resource Provision and Allocation Based on Microeconomic Theory in Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) can significantly improve the performance of mobile applications by leveraging nearby servers as the edge cloud to provide task offloading execution service for a smart mobile device (SMD) through wireless access points (APs). However, the edge cloud and AP will not provide free services. Their radio frequency resources and computing resource are limited but the service requests from various mobile devices could be massive. The goal of this article is to provide a pricing mechanism to efficiently allocate limited resources in the MEC system according to the budget of SMDs. To this end, we first present a market model of MEC resources that can give a real insight into the incentives for resource sharing at network edges. In the model, computation, and radio resources can be traded between resource suppliers (AP and edge cloud) and buyers (SMDs). Furthermore, we employ the microeconomic theory to get an optimal budget allocation strategy for the SMD to maximize its utility within a limited budget. Moreover, we propose an Equilibrium Price Finding (EPF) algorithm to find the equilibrium price of the MEC system, maximizing the whole system utility and leading to optimal resource allocation. Finally, simulation results show that, compared with state-of-the-art resource allocation methods, our optimal budget allocation algorithm can find budget allocation strategy more effectively and our equilibrium price finding algorithm can achieve market equilibrium to optimally allocate computation and radio resources in the MEC system.