TANDEM: Trust-Aware Sustainable Data Offloading in Multi-Access Edge Computing

The need to maintain efficient and environmentally responsible data processing at the network edge has introduced a new research field in the area of edge computing sustainability. This paper introduces a novel social-aware, trust-based data offloading framework, named TANDEM, in Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) environments. TANDEM is designed to jointly optimize the user' data offloading strategies and the MEC providers' dynamic pricing policies. TANDEM incorporates a social-aware trust model based on direct and indirect interactions of the users with the MEC servers, and is based on a Stackelberg game-theoretic approach to optimize the data offloading and pricing. TANDEM significantly outperforms existing methods by reducing carbon emissions in MEC systems and ensuring a sustainable edge computing environment.