Joint Task Offloading and Payment Determination for Mobile Edge Computing: A Stable Matching Based Approach

In mobile edge computing (MEC), it is challenging to offload tasks to appropriate edge nodes due to the heterogeneity in both tasks and edge nodes. Most existing task offloading mechanisms mainly aim at optimizing the global system performance, e.g., social welfare, while ignoring the personal preferences of the individual tasks and edge nodes. However, in an open MEC system, a task offloading decision is prone to be unstable if edge nodes or task owners have incentives to deviate from the decided allocation, and seek for alternative choices to improve their own utilities. In addition, to win the competition, task owners may gradually adjust their payments, which brings new challenge in achieving the stability of the system. To address the above issues, this paper constructs a distributed many-to-many matching model to capture the interaction between mobile tasks and edge nodes, with the consideration of their diverse resource requirements and availabilities. Based on this, we design both distributed and centralized stable matching based algorithms to jointly offload the tasks to edge nodes, and determine their payments. We prove that the proposed mechanisms achieve several desirable properties including individual rationality, stability, and convergency. It is also proved that the proposed schemes can get optimal social welfare, when the considered tasks are homogeneous in terms of their resource requirements. Finally, we conduct simulations to validate the effectiveness of the proposed work.