Pricing policy and computational resource provisioning for delay-aware mobile edge computing

Mobile edge computing is a novel technique to offer cloud-based computation offloading services to mobile users with short delay. However, the Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) of the edge cloud are generally different from the CSPs of remote Internet cloud. Considering the competition between the heterogeneous clouds, we study the optimal provisioning of the computational resource in the edge cloud. We firstly analyze the Nash equilibrium prices of the cloud market when the amount of edge computational resource is given. Based on the pricing policy, we further design an algorithm to optimize the edge computational resource capacity so that the profit of the edge cloud is maximized. We also derive the lower and upper bound of the optimal edge computational resource. The numerical results indicate that the profit of the edge cloud is greatly influenced by the price of the remote cloud when users care more about the price than the delay.