A Sharing-Economy Inspired Pricing Mechanism for Multi-Access Edge Computing

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is an emerging paradigm which allows users to offload their computationally intensive tasks to the network edge. In this paper, we analyze resource allocation in MEC from the market and economic perspective. Due to extremely heterogeneous usage demands across users in the future IoE market, current coarse-grained pricing schemes result in partial wastage: some users would have excess un-utilized resource quota while others might have reserved insufficient resources. Therefore, we introduce a novel sharing economy-inspired business model, where a platform facilitates the sharing of resource quota among users, increasing resource efficiency. The goal is to maximize the overall welfare of users who join the sharing platform. As the platform lacks control and has imperfect knowledge of users' payoff functions and distributions, a distributed pricing mechanism is proposed. In our mechanism, the platform and users jointly arrive at an equilibrium. We prove that the equilibrium point of the mechanism is the socially optimal point. Simulations illustrate convergence, the robustness of our mechanism to changes in demand and supply, and that sharing increases the welfare of users.