Overbooking-Empowered Computing Resource Provisioning in Cloud-Aided Mobile Edge Networks

Conventional computing resource trading over mobile networks generally faces many challenges, e.g., excessive decision-making latency, undesired trading failures, and underutilization of dynamic resources, owing to the constraint of wireless networks. To improve resource utilization rate under dynamic network conditions, this paper introduces a novel computing resource provisioning mechanism empowered by overbooking, that allows the amount of booked resources to exceed the resource supply. Cloud-aided mobile edge networks are considered for the proposed framework, where an edge server can purchase more resources from a cloud server to offer computing services to multiple end-users with computation-intensive tasks. Specifically, the proposed mechanism relies on designing pre-signed forward trading contracts among edge and end-users, as well as between edge and cloud in advance to future practical trading; while encouraging an appropriate overbooking rate to improve resource utilization, via analyzing historical statistics associated with uncertainties such as dynamic resource supply/demand, and varying channel qualities. The contract design is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem that aims to maximize the expected utilities of end-users, edge, and cloud, via evaluating potential risks; for which a two-phase multilateral negotiation scheme is proposed that facilitates the bargaining procedure among the three parties, to reach the final trading consensus (namely, contract terms). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism achieves mutually beneficial utilities of three parties, while outperforming baseline methods on significant indicators such as task completion, trading failure, time efficiency, resource usage, etc., from various analytical angles.