Game theory based joint task offloading and resource allocation algorithm for mobile edge computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has emerged for reducing energy consumption and latency by allowing mobile users to offload computationally intensive tasks to the MEC server. Due to the spectrum reuse in the network of MEC, the inner-cell interference has a great effect on MEC's performance. In this paper, for reducing the energy consumption and latency of MEC, we propose a game theory based approach to join task offloading decision and resource allocation together in the MEC system. In this algorithm, the offloading decision, the CPU capacity adjustment, the transmission power control, and the network interference management of mobile users are regarded as a game. In this game, based on the best response strategy, each mobile user makes their own utility maximum rather than the utility of the whole system. We prove that this game is an exact potential game and the Nash equilibrium (NE) of this game exists. We also investigate the properties of this algorithm, including the convergence, the computational complexity, and the Price of anarchy (PoA). We evaluate the performance of this algorithm by simulation. The simulation results illustrate that this algorithm is effective in improving the performance of the multi-user MEC system.