Edge coalition construction based on a novel market equilibrium price

The emergence of multi-access edge computing (MEC) aims at extending cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the radio access network. As the large-scale internet of things (IoT) services are rapidly growing, a single edge infrastructure provider (EIP) may not be sufficient to handle the data traffic generated by these services. Most of the existing work addressed the computing resource shortage problem by optimizing tasks schedule, whereas others overcome such issue by placing computing resources on demand. However, when considering a multiple EIPs scenario, an urgent challenge is how to generate a coalition structure to maximize each EIP's gain with a suitable price for computing resource block corresponding to a container. To this end, we design a scheme of EIPs collaboration with a market price for containers under a scenario that considers a collection of service providers (SPs) with different budgets and several EIPs distributed in geographical locations. First, we bring in the net profit market price model to generate a more reasonable equilibrium price and select the optimal EIPs for each SP by a convex program. Then we use a mathematical model to maximize EIP's profits and form stable coalitions between EIPs by a distributed coalition formation algorithm. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed collaborative scheme among EIPs enhances EIPs' gain and increases users' surplus.