AI-Bazaar: A Cloud-Edge Computing Power Trading Framework for Ubiquitous AI Services

Driven by the burgeoning growth of the Internet of Everything and the substantial breakthroughs in deep learning (DL) algorithms, a booming of artificial intelligence (AI) applications keep emerging. Meanwhile, the advance in existing computing paradigms, i.e., cloud computing and edge computing, provide assorted computing solutions to satisfy the increasingly high requirements for ubiquitous AI services. Nevertheless, there are some non-trivial issues in the computing frameworks, including the underutilization of computing power, the self-interest of computing-power trading mechanism, and the inefficiency of AI services management. To tackle the above issues, we propose a computing-power trading framework based on blockchain, also named AI-Bazaar. In AI-Bazaar, the AI consumers play multiple roles and feel free to contribute the computing power rented from the computing-power provider (CPP) for blockchain mining and AI services. Accordingly, we formulate the computing trading problem as a Stackelberg game. Based on the win or learn fast principle (WoLF), we design a profit-balanced multi-agent reinforcement learning (PB-MARL) algorithm to search the AI-Bazaar equilibrium, while finding the balanced profits for AI consumers and CPP. Numerical simulations are carried out to demonstrate the satisfactory performance and effectiveness of the proposed framework.