A Multi-User Mobile Computation Offloading and Transmission Scheduling Mechanism for Delay-Sensitive Applications

In this paper, a mobile edge computing framework with multi-user computation offloading and transmission scheduling for delay-sensitive applications is studied. In the considered model, computation tasks are generated randomly at mobile users along the time. For each task, the mobile user can choose to either process it locally or offload it via the uplink transmission to the edge for cloud computing. To efficiently manage the system, the network regulator is required to employ a network-wide optimal scheme for computation offloading and transmission scheduling while guaranteeing that all mobile users would like to follow (as they may naturally behave strategically for benefiting themselves). By considering tradeoffs between local and edge computing, wireless features and noncooperative game interactions among mobile users, we formulate a mechanism design problem to jointly determine a computation offloading scheme, a transmission scheduling discipline, and a pricing rule. A queueing model is built to analytically describe the packet-level network dynamics. Based on this, we propose a novel mechanism, which can maximize the network social welfare (i.e., the network-wide performance), while achieving a game equilibrium among strategic mobile users. Theoretical and simulation results examine the performance of our proposed mechanism, and demonstrate its superiority over the counterparts.