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Contract-based Cooperative Computation and Communication Resources Sharing in Mobile Edge Computing

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Abstract

In this paper, we consider a Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) system with a source transmitter (ST) and multiple relay nodes (RNs). ST has sufficient computing resources, but lacks communication ability, while the situation of RN is the opposite. To tackle this resource imbalance problem, we propose a cooperative computation and communication resources sharing strategy using contract theory under complete and incomplete information scenarios. The ST offers a contract combining computation time and relay power, and the RNs forward the computational results for ST in exchange for the usage of computation capacity. For complete information scenario, we derive the optimal contract to maximize the ST’s utility and we show the existence and uniqueness of optimal contract. We further explore the properties of a feasible contract for incomplete information scenario where the channel gain and relay cost are the private information of RNs and not known by ST. We analyze the necessary and sufficient conditions for a contract to be feasible and propose a sequence optimization algorithm to obtain the optimal contract. Finally, we show the feasibility and optimality of the contract through simulation results.

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Data Availability

All data, models, or code generated or used during the study are available from the corresponding author by request.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the Nature Science Foundation of Fujian Province (Grant No.2021J011002, No.2021J011004, No.2020J01813).

Funding

This work is supported by the Nature Science Foundation of Fujian Province (Grant No.2021J011002, No.2021J011004, No.2020J01813).

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    Authors and Affiliations

    1. School of Computer Sciences, Minnan Normal University, No.36, Xianqian Street, Zhangzhou, 363000, Fujian, China

      Yifeng Zheng, Lushan Zou, Wenjie Zhang, Jingmin Yang & Ziqiong Lin

    2. Key Laboratory of Data Science and Intelligence Application, Minnan Normal University, No.36, Xianqian Street, Zhangzhou, 363000, Fujian, China

      Yifeng Zheng, Lushan Zou, Wenjie Zhang & Ziqiong Lin

    3. Department of Electronic Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, No.1, Section 3, Zhongxiao East Road, Taibei, 610101, Taiwan, China

      Jingmin Yang

    4. College of Information and Electrical Engineering, China Agricultural University, No.17 Qinghua East Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100000, China

      Liwei Yang

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    1. Yifeng Zheng
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    Contributions

    Yifeng Zheng wrote fifty percentage of the manuscript, performed mathematical modeling design and construction, and also conducted part of the experiment. Lushan zou contributed to the conception of the study and wrote fifty percentage of the manuscript. Wenjie Zhang contributed significantly to the conception, analysis and algorithms design of the study. Jingmin Yang performed the data analyses and English grammar checking. Liwei Yang helped perform the analysis with constructive discussions. Ziqiong Lin helped improve the English grammar and checked spelling.

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    Correspondence to Wenjie Zhang.

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    The authors declared that they have no conflicts of interest to this work. We declare that we do not have any commercial or associative interest that represents a conflict of interest in connection with the work submitted.

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    Liwei Yang and Ziqiong Lin contributed equally to this work.

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    Zheng, Y., Zou, L., Zhang, W. et al. Contract-based Cooperative Computation and Communication Resources Sharing in Mobile Edge Computing. J Grid Computing 21, 14 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-023-09649-y

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