Monetizing Edge Service in Mobile Internet Ecosystem
Zhiyuan Wang, Lin Xia Gao, Tong Wang, Jingjing Luo · IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing · 2020
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 serviceis 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 theoff-linesolution with crucial insights, based on which we design anonlinestrategy with provable performance. Then, we study the ESP's edge service monetization problem. We propose a pricing policy that can achieve aconstant fractionof the ex post optimal revenue with an extraconstant lossfor 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.