Socially Trusted Collaborative Edge Computing in Ultra Dense Networks

摘要

Small cell base stations (SBSs) endowed with cloud-like computingcapabilities are considered as a key enabler of edge computing (EC), whichprovides ultra-low latency and location-awareness for a variety of emergingmobile applications and the Internet of Things. However, due to the limitedcomputation resources of an individual SBS, providing computation services ofhigh quality to its users faces significant challenges when it is overloadedwith an excessive amount of computation workload. In this paper, we proposecollaborative edge computing among SBSs by forming SBS coalitions to sharecomputation resources with each other, thereby accommodating more computationworkload in the edge system and reducing reliance on the remote cloud. A novelSBS coalition formation algorithm is developed based on the coalitional gametheory to cope with various new challenges in small-cell-based edge systems,including the co-provisioning of radio access and computing services,cooperation incentives, and potential security risks. To address thesechallenges, the proposed method (1) allows collaboration at both the user-SBSassociation stage and the SBS peer offloading stage by exploiting the ultradense deployment of SBSs, (2) develops a payment-based incentive mechanism thatimplements proportionally fair utility division to form stable SBS coalitions,and (3) builds a social trust network for managing security risks among SBSsdue to collaboration. Systematic simulations in practical scenarios are carriedout to evaluate the efficacy and performance of the proposed method, whichshows that tremendous edge computing performance improvement can be achieved.