Offloading in Software Defined Network at Edge with Information Asymmetry: A Contract Theoretical Approach

The proliferation of highly capable mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets has significantly increased the demand for wireless access. Software defined network (SDN) at edge is viewed as one promising technology to simplify the traffic offloading process for current wireless networks. In this paper, we investigate the incentive problem in SDN-at-edge of how to motivate a third party access points (APs) such as WiFi and smallcells to offload traffic for the central base stations (BSs). The APs will only admit the traffic from the BS under the precondition that their own traffic demand is satisfied. Under the information asymmetry that the APs know more about own traffic demands, the BS needs to distribute the payment in accordance with the APs' idle capacity to maintain a compatible incentive. First, we apply a contract-theoretic approach to model and analyze the service trading between the BS and APs. Furthermore, other two incentive mechanisms: optimal discrimination contract and linear pricing contract are introduced to serve as the comparisons of the anti adverse selection contract. Finally, the simulation results show that the contract can effectively incentivize APs' participation and offload the cellular network traffic. Furthermore, the anti adverse selection contract achieves the optimal outcome under the information asymmetry scenario.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure

Mobile, collaborative augmented reality using cloudlets

The evolution in mobile applications to support advanced interactivity and demanding multimedia features is still ongoing. Novel application concepts (e.g. mobile Augmented Reality (AR)) are however hindered by the inherently limited resources available on mobile platforms (not withstanding the dramatic performance increases of mobile hardware). Offloading resource intensive application components to the cloud, also known as "cyber foraging", has proven to be a valuable solution in a variety of scenarios. However, also for collaborative scenarios, in which data together with its processing are shared between multiple users, this offloading concept is highly promising. In this paper, we investigate the challenges posed by offloading collaborative mobile applications. We present a middleware platform capable of autonomously deploying software components to minimize average CPU load, while guaranteeing smooth collaboration. As a use case, we present and evaluate a collaborative AR application, offering interaction between users, the physical environment as well as with the virtual objects superimposed on this physical environment

Socially Trusted Collaborative Edge Computing in Ultra Dense Networks

Small cell base stations (SBSs) endowed with cloud-like computing capabilities are considered as a key enabler of edge computing (EC), which provides ultra-low latency and location-awareness for a variety of emerging mobile applications and the Internet of Things. However, due to the limited computation resources of an individual SBS, providing computation services of high quality to its users faces significant challenges when it is overloaded with an excessive amount of computation workload. In this paper, we propose collaborative edge computing among SBSs by forming SBS coalitions to share computation resources with each other, thereby accommodating more computation workload in the edge system and reducing reliance on the remote cloud. A novel SBS coalition formation algorithm is developed based on the coalitional game theory to cope with various new challenges in small-cell-based edge systems, including the co-provisioning of radio access and computing services, cooperation incentives, and potential security risks. To address these challenges, the proposed method (1) allows collaboration at both the user-SBS association stage and the SBS peer offloading stage by exploiting the ultra dense deployment of SBSs, (2) develops a payment-based incentive mechanism that implements proportionally fair utility division to form stable SBS coalitions, and (3) builds a social trust network for managing security risks among SBSs due to collaboration. Systematic simulations in practical scenarios are carried out to evaluate the efficacy and performance of the proposed method, which shows that tremendous edge computing performance improvement can be achieved.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1010.4501 by other author

Cloud/fog computing resource management and pricing for blockchain networks

The mining process in blockchain requires solving a proof-of-work puzzle, which is resource expensive to implement in mobile devices due to the high computing power and energy needed. In this paper, we, for the first time, consider edge computing as an enabler for mobile blockchain. In particular, we study edge computing resource management and pricing to support mobile blockchain applications in which the mining process of miners can be offloaded to an edge computing service provider. We formulate a two-stage Stackelberg game to jointly maximize the profit of the edge computing service provider and the individual utilities of the miners. In the first stage, the service provider sets the price of edge computing nodes. In the second stage, the miners decide on the service demand to purchase based on the observed prices. We apply the backward induction to analyze the sub-game perfect equilibrium in each stage for both uniform and discriminatory pricing schemes. For the uniform pricing where the same price is applied to all miners, the existence and uniqueness of Stackelberg equilibrium are validated by identifying the best response strategies of the miners. For the discriminatory pricing where the different prices are applied to different miners, the Stackelberg equilibrium is proved to exist and be unique by capitalizing on the Variational Inequality theory. Further, the real experimental results are employed to justify our proposed model.Comment: 16 pages, double-column version, accepted by IEEE Internet of Things Journa