FEUAGame: Fairness-Aware Edge User Allocation for App Vendors

Mobile edge computing (MEC) offers a new computing paradigm that turns computing and storage resources to the network edge to provide minimal service latency compared to cloud computing. Many research works have attempted to help app vendors allocate users to appropriate edge servers for high-performance service provisioning. However, existing edge user allocation (EUA) approaches have ignored fairness in users’ data rates caused by interference, which is crucial in service provisioning in the MEC environment. To pursue fairness in EUA, edge users need to be assigned to edge servers so their quality of experience can be ensured at minimum costs without significant service performance differences among them. In this paper, we make the first attempt to address this fair edge user allocation (FEUA) problem. Specifically, we formulate the FEUA problem, prove its $\mathcal {NP}$ -hardness, and propose an optimal approach to solve small-scale FEUA problems. To accommodate large-scale FEUA scenarios, we propose a game-theoretic approach called FEUAGame that transforms the FEUA problem into a potential game that admits a Nash equilibrium. FEUA employs a decentralized algorithm to find the Nash equilibrium in the potential game as the solution to the FEUA problem. A widely-used real-world data set is utilised to experimentally compare the performance of FEUAGame to four representative approaches. The numerical outcomes show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches in solving the FEUA problem.