A Game-Theoretical Approach for Task Offloading in Edge Computing

Edge computing is envisioned as a prominent technology that provides high computing demand services by offloading computation-intensive and delay-sensitive task from mobile or Internet of Things(IoT) devices to nearby edge servers. However, more and more edge servers are deployed near the terminal devices. The uneven distribution of devices will lead to insufficient resource utilization of edge servers, so the social benefits of the edge computing system decrease. In this paper, we propose an effective task offloading strategy in the scenario of multi-users and multi-edge servers. Terminal devices broadcast task offloading request to edge servers, and the edge servers compete for tasks to improve their resource utilization. We use a non-cooperative game to describe the competition of edge servers, and model an optimization problem as the multi-edge servers resource allocation problem. We then design an iterative algorithm to solve the optimization problem and prove that the problem has an unique Nash equilibrium. Simulation results show that the proposed offloading strategy not only improves the resource utilization of edge servers, but also guarantees the demand of terminal devices.