Competition and Cooperation between Edge and Remote Clouds: A Stackelberg Game Approach
Yu Xin, Ling Tang · 2018
By serving users' requests at the network edge, mobile edge computing (MEC) can reduce the service delay and increase users' quality of experience. However, the limited resources at the edge clouds become the bottleneck of the performance of MEC. Cooperation with the resourceful remote cloud can enhance the performance of MEC. In this paper, we consider the problem of simultaneous competition and cooperation between an edge cloud and a remote cloud. Specifically, each cloud competes with each other by optimizing its resource price to attract the users. Meanwhile, the edge cloud cooperates with the remote cloud based on a revenue sharing contract. We formulate the interaction between the edge and remote clouds as a three-stage Stackelberg game. Based on the backward induction method, we first show that there exists a unique Nash equilibrium price vector given the revenue sharing contract. Then, we derive the optimal revenue sharing ratio based on the competition prices at the equilibrium. The numerical results validate our analytical results.