A Truthful Online Mechanism for Collaborative Computation Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing

Collaborative computation offloading in mobile edge computing where edge users offload tasks opportunistically to resourceful neighboring mobile devices (MDs), offers a promising solution to satisfy low-latency requirements. However, most existing works assume that those MDs volunteer to help edge users without an incentive mechanism. In this article, we propose an auction-based incentive mechanism, where users and MDs participate in the system dynamically. Our auction mechanism runs in the online fashion and optimizes the long-term system welfare without knowledge of future information, e.g., task start time, task length, resource demand, and valuation, etc. We prove that the proposed online mechanism achieves the desired properties, including individual rationality, truthfulness, and computational tractability. Moreover, the theoretical competitive ratio shows that our online mechanism achieves near-optimal long-term social welfare close to the offline optimum. Extensive experiments based on real-world traces demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed online mechanism.