Service Mechanism for the Cloud-Edge Collaboration System Considering Quality of Experience in the Digital Economy Era: An Evolutionary Game Approach

In the digital economy era, cloud–edge collaboration technology provides the necessary technical support for the digital transformation of enterprises, which can improve the quality of services (QoS), and it attracts extensive attention from scholars and entrepreneurs from all fields. Under the bounded-rationality hypothesis, this paper investigates the service mechanism for the cloud–edge collaboration system considering the quality of experience (QoE) and presents a dynamic evolutionary game model between cloud service providers and edge operators by applying the evolutionary game theory. Then, this paper analyzes the equilibrium and stability conditions for the decision-making of both parties involved to guarantee the QoE reaches the ideal state. In addition, we investigate the factors that influence the stable cooperation between the two evolutionary stable strategies and validate the theoretical analytical results with numerical simulations. The research results show that the final evolution of the cloud–edge collaboration system depends on the benefits and costs of the game matrix between the two parties and the initial state values of the system. Under a specific condition, the cloud–edge collaboration system can eventually be driven to be an ideal state by reducing the collaboration cost and improving the collaboration benefit. The more both parties focus on the QoE, the more conducive it will be for the formation of a cloud–edge collaboration, thus effectively promoting long-term stability and better serving enterprises’ digital transformation.