An Efficient Winner and Payment Determination Algorithm in Reverse Auction for Edge Federation

Edge federation is a promising approach for reducing the workload of each operator by facilitating resource sharing amongst operators. However, operators often exhibit selfish behavior, prioritizing their own benefits. They may refrain from participating in edge federation or misrepresent the actual value of their resources, which ultimately diminishes the overall benefits of edge federation. To address this issue, we first establish a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG)-based reverse auction framework for task offloading in edge federation. In the framework, a winner determination problem is formulated as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem. The ILP problem formulated has high computational complexity and cannot be applied to large and dynamic network environments. Thus, we propose an efficient winner and payment (W&P) determination algorithm to obtain sub-optimal solutions in polynomial time. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm increases the total profit of edge federation by up to 119.7% and reduces total resource usage by up to 54.8%, respectively, compared to other comparison algorithms.