Offloading Game for Mobile Edge Computing With Random Access in IoT

Abstract

In the Internet of Things (IoT), numerous devices and sensors are deployed to collect data sets. Although some IoT devices can process data locally, most devices may have limited power and computational capability. Since mobile edge computing (MEC) is a new paradigm to provide strong computing capability at the edge of networks close to users, these devices can offload their tasks to MEC servers. Therefore, designing an efficient computation offloading strategy to decide whether the tasks to be offloaded to MEC servers becomes crucial. In this paper, we study the computation offloading for IoT devices based on a non-cooperative game with one-shot random access, where users’ offloading decisions can be made independently to realize distributed offloading. In particular, we discuss the offloading game with and without sharing information among devices and find the Nash equilibrium (NE). Besides, we analyze the effective bandwidth as a performance metric from a device perspective, which considering the Quality of Service (QoS) of network layer while analyzing users’ offloading strategies. Simulation results show the effectiveness of proposed strategies and the impact of offloading tasks to users’ strategies in time-varying channel based on effective bandwidth.