A multi-user multi-operator computing pricing method for Internet of things based on bi-level optimization

Wei Jiang, Huiqiang Wang, Bingyang Li, Haibin Lv and Qingchuan Meng

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 2020, vol. 16, issue 1, 1550147719900110

Abstract: The Internet of mobile things is a promising paradigm that generates, stores, and processes amount of real-time data to render rich services for mobile users. Along with the increase of mobile devices in the field of Internet of things, more and more intelligent applications, such as face recognition and virtual reality, have emerged. These applications typically consume large amounts of computing and energy resources. However, due to the physical size limitations of Internet of things terminals, their computing capacity and power are limited, where users’ needs for application processing delay and power consumption cannot be met. Therefore, the concept of edge cloud computing has been proposed, which enhances the computing capacity of Internet of things terminals by offloading user tasks to edge servers for computation. When there are multiple operators, it is important to understand how users choose an operator to perform computation and how operators can reasonably price the computing capacity to meet their own interests. Therefore, we study the computation pricing and user decision-making problems of Internet of things under multi-user and multi-operator scenarios. The problem is divided into three phases and modeled as a two-level optimization problem. While an operator’s goal is to minimize the loss of his interests, the user’s goal is to minimize the computation cost (energy consumption and price). First, since the lower-level user decision-making problem is an integer linear programming problem, we transform it into an equivalent continuous linear programming problem by relaxation. Second, we transform the bi-level optimization problem into an equivalent single-level optimization problem by substituting the lower problem’s Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions into an upper problem. Finally, we use a spatial branch and bound algorithm to solve the problem. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively maintain the benefits of both operators and users in the field of Internet of things.

Keywords: Internet of things; computation offloading; data offloading; edge computing; bi-level optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1550147719900110 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:intdis:v:16:y:2020:i:1:p:1550147719900110

DOI: 10.1177/1550147719900110

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().