A game-theoretic approach to computation offloading in mobile cloud computing

We consider a three-tier architecture for mobile and pervasive computing scenarios, consisting of a local tier of mobile nodes, a middle tier (cloudlets) of nearby computing nodes, typically located at the mobile nodes access points but characterized by a limited amount of resources, and a remote tier of distant cloud servers, which have practically infinite resources. This architecture has been proposed to get the benefits of computation offloading from mobile nodes to external servers while limiting the use of distant servers whose higher latency could negatively impact the user experience. For this architecture, we consider a usage scenario where no central authority exists and multiple non-cooperative mobile users share the limited computing resources of a close-by cloudlet and can selfishly decide to send their computations to any of the three tiers. We define a model to capture the users interaction and to investigate the effects of computation offloading on the users' perceived performance. We formulate the problem as a generalized Nash equilibrium problem and show existence of an equilibrium. We present a distributed algorithm for the computation of an equilibrium which is tailored to the problem structure and is based on an in-depth analysis of the underlying equilibrium problem. Through numerical examples, we illustrate its behavior and the characteristics of the achieved equilibria.