Coalition Formation Game for Task Offloading in Edge Computing with Considering Individual Rationality and Collective Rationality of Users

With the development of 5G, edge computing has raised as a promising technology to satisfy the requirements of computation-intensive and delay-sensitive applications. In this work, we try to propose a task offloading strategy for end users, with considering their individual rationality and collective rationality at the same time. Specially, a user only with individual rationality aims to minimize the completion time of its own task, while a user only with collective rationality aims to minimize the total task completion time achieved by the system. The problem is particularly difficult, as there exist essential conflicts between the individual utility of each user and the collective utility of the system, which cannot be optimized simultaneously. To overcome the difficulties, we first reformulate the problem as a coalition formation game. Then, we propose an iterative algorithm, in which each user can make its task offloading decision in a decentralized way. Additionally, we rigorously prove the properties achieved by our algorithm in terms of stability, optimality, and convergence rate. Extensive simulations are also conducted to validate the performance of our algorithm compared with baselines.