Fault-Tolerant Mechanism for Edge-Based IoT Networks With Demand Uncertainty

Due to ubiquitous increase of mobile services and powerful Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, the interest for mobile-edge computing (MEC) solutions has grown both in industry and academia. One of the fundamental mechanisms of MEC is offloading, i.e., delegation of a computation from the user to a server (set) placed near to the edge. Edge servers may have poor incentives to run a delegated service, for example, for the temporary limited resources. In this article, we dissect the incentive mechanisms within a MEC ecosystem with the aim of ensuring a fault-tolerant edge service under unreliable scenarios. In particular, we design an auction mechanism to model the interaction between the MEC players, and model the edge users’ probability of successful offloading, assuming that the cost of executing each offloading request is private. Scrutinizing the demand uncertainty of edge users, the main motive of our auction method is to optimize the offloading cost to engage more edge users in this process, while imposing probabilistic guarantees of offloading service execution. Our offloading cost minimization problem is considered to be an NP-hard. For the solution, we use a heuristic methodology to get the optimal approximation ratio and provide economical fairness. We provide exhaustive simulation results to show the excellent performance of our scheme.