A Pricing Model for Sharing Cloudlets in Mobile Cloud Computing

Driven by pervasive mobile devices and ubiquitous wireless communication networks, mobile cloud computing emerges as an appealing paradigm to accommodate demands for running power-hungry or computation-intensive applications over resource-constrained mobile devices. Cloudlets that move available resources closer to the network edge offer a promising architecture to support real-time applications, such as online gaming and speech recognition. To stimulate service provisioning by cloudlets, it is essential to design an incentive mechanism that charges mobile devices and rewards cloudlets. Although auction has been considered as a promising form for incentive, it is challenging to design an auction mechanism that holds certain desirable properties for the cloudlet scenario. In the paper, we propose an appropriate auction mechanism for the allocation of resource between mobile devices as service users (buyers) and cloudlets as service providers (sellers). The mechanism can effectively distribute cloudlets to meet the requirement of mobile devices. By analyzing both theory and experimental results, we find that the proposed mechanism achieves individual rationality, budget balance, and near-optimal economic efficiency.