A Shapley Value-Based Incentive Mechanism in Collaborative Edge Computing

In recent years, with the rapid proliferation of smart devices, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has been regarded as a promising technique that provides computing services in proximity to end-users. To improve the performance of MEC systems, Collaborative Edge Computing (CEC) is proposed to balance the load among cooperative edge servers. In practice, however, edge servers belong to different MEC service providers (SPs) and they have no incentive to help others. To encourage the cooperation between self-interested SPs, in this paper, we propose a profit-sharing incentive mechanism based on the Shapley value. In addition to the desirable properties such as efficiency and fairness, we also proved that our mechanism induces optimal offloading strategies and provides every SP an incentive to join the coalition. To protect the private information of SPs, we defined an aggregate profit function for each SP and showed that revealing this function is sufficient to calculate the profit allocation. Simulation results demonstrate that the system performance and SPs' revenue are substantially improved under cooperation.