Online Incentive Mechanism Design for Collaborative Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing

In this paper, an online truthful mechanism integrating task executor selection, computation and communication resource allocation is proposed. Different from most existing work in the literature that was based on offline settings, in our system model, upon the arrival of a smartphone user who requests task offloading, the base station (BS) needs to make a decision right away without knowing any future information. By considering each task's specific requirements in terms of data size, delay, and preference, we formulate a social-welfare-maximization problem and propose a novel online mechanism to solve it. Both theoretical analyses and numerical results show that our mechanism can guarantee feasibility, truthfulness, and computational efficiency with a competitive ratio of 3.