End-to-End Service Auction: A General Double Auction Mechanism for Edge Computing Services

Abstract

Ubiquitous powerful personal computing facilities, such as desktop computers and parked autonomous cars, can function as micro edge computing servers by leveraging their spare resources. However, to harvest their resources for service provisioning, two significant challenges will arise: how to incentivize the server owners to contribute their computing resources, and how to guarantee the end-to-end (E2E) Quality-of-Service (QoS) for service buyers? In this paper, we address these two problems in a holistic way by advocating COMSA. Unlike the existing double auction schemes for edge computing which mostly focus on computing resource trading, COMSA addresses the joint problem of double auction mechanism design and network resource allocation by explicitly taking spectrum allocation and data routing into account, thereby providing E2E QoS guarantees for edge computing services. To handle the design complexity, COMSA employs a two-step procedure to decouple network optimization and mechanism design, which hence can be applied to general network optimization problems for edge computing. COMSA holds some critical economic properties, i.e., truthfulness, budget balance, and individual rationality. Our extensive simulation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of COMSA.