A Computationally Efficient Bargaining Mechanism for Fog Commerce

Fog commerce refers to the activity of buying and selling fog computing resources. To bolster fog commerce, this work devises a novel layered bargaining mechanism comprising 1) a bargaining protocol that specifies the rules that govern the bargaining activities, 2) a bargaining strategy that adjusts price proposals by making concessions and enables agents to conserve computational resources by selectively engaging their bargaining activities only with trading partners with price proposals that are relatively close to theirs, and 3) a transitive pricing formula for pricing vertically arranged fog and cloud resources. To simulate price bargaining of vertically arranged fog and cloud resources, this work devises an agent-based fog commerce testbed. Whereas mathematical proofs validate that the layered fog bargaining mechanism is computationally efficient and rapidly converging, empirical results show that it outperforms related bargaining mechanisms.