Monetizing Edge Service in Mobile Internet Ecosystem

In mobile Internet ecosystem, mobile users (MUs) purchase wireless data services from Internet service provider (ISP) to access to Internet and acquire the interested content services (e.g., online game) from Content Provider (CP). The popularity of intelligent functions (e.g., AI and 3D modeling) increases the computation-intensity of the content services, leading to a growing computation pressure for the MUs' resource-limited devices. To this end, edge computing service is emerging as a promising approach to alleviate the MUs' computation pressure while keeping their quality-of-service, via offloading some computation tasks of MUs to edge (computing) servers deployed at the local network edge. Thus, edge service provider (ESP), who deploys the edge servers and offers the edge computing service, becomes an upcoming new stakeholder in the ecosystem. In this work, we study the economic interactions of MUs, ISP, CP, and ESP in the new ecosystem with edge computing service, where MUs can acquire the computation-intensive content services (offered by CP) and offload some computation tasks, together with the necessary raw input data, to edge servers (deployed by ESP) through ISP. We first study the MU's Joint Content Acquisition and Task Offloading (J-CATO) problem, which aims to maximize his long-term payoff. We derive the off-line solution with crucial insights, based on which we design an online strategy with provable performance. Then, we study the ESP's edge service monetization problem. We propose a pricing policy that can achieve a constant fraction of the ex post optimal revenue with an extra constant loss for the ESP. Numerical results show that the edge computing service can stimulate the MUs' content acquisition and improve the payoffs of MUs, ISP, and CP.

Automated summary

This article focuses on the edge computing service in the mobile internet ecosystem and studies the economic interactions among mobile users, internet service providers, content providers, and edge service providers. By offloading computation tasks to edge servers, the edge computing service can alleviate the computation pressure of mobile users while maintaining the quality of service. The study finds that the edge computing service can stimulate content acquisition for mobile users and improve the payoffs of mobile users, internet service providers, and content providers.