Incentivizing Resource Contribution for Video Analytics in Computing Power Networking: A Dual-Layer Stackelberg Game Approach

The explosion of cameras embedded in IoT devices—from mobile phones to autonomous vehicles—has positioned video analytics as a transformative AI tool across healthcare, smart cities, and beyond. Yet, the substantial computing and bandwidth demands of these applications outstrip what IoT devices alone can handle, particularly when low latency is required. Computing Power Networking (CPN) is an emerging solution that unifies cloud, edge, and device resources, enabling seamless, efficient task distribution for real-time analytics. While recent advances in cloud-edge frameworks show promise, current approaches often neglect the economic incentives that drive resource availability. To address this, we present a novel, privacy-enabled dual-layer Stackelberg game model that establishes a dynamic pricing strategy for video analytics in CPN. Our model introduces a two-stage negotiation: IoT devices contract with edge servers for computational and bandwidth resources, while edge servers may offload tasks to the cloud for enhanced service. Using game theory, we derive optimal pricing and offloading strategies under both complete and incomplete information, proving a Nash equilibrium. Comprehensive simulations validate our approach, showing improvements in resource efficiency, reduced latency, and incentivized resource-sharing across all CPN tiers. Specifically, our hybrid offloading strategy significantly reduces latency compared to edge-only and cloud-only computation models. For varying IoT device quantities, the average latency reduction across all scenarios is approximately 30.5%. This work provides an economically sustainable, privacy-conscious solution to the computational challenges of video analytics in an interconnected, resource-sharing ecosystem.