Optimal Pricing for Job Offloading in the MEC System with Two Priority Classes

Abstract: Multi-Access edge computing (MEC) is an emerging paradigm where users offload computationally intensive jobs to the Access Point (AP). Given that the AP's resources are shared by selfish users, pricing is a useful tool for incentivising users to internalize the negative externality of delay they cause to other users. Nevertheless, different users have different negative valuations towards delay as some are more delay sensitive. To serve heterogeneous users, we propose a priority pricing scheme where users can get served first for a higher price. Our goal is to find the prices such that in decision making, users will choose the class and the offloading frequency that jointly maximize social welfare. With the assumption that the AP knows users' profit functions, we derive in semi-closed form the optimal prices. However in practice, the reporting of users's profit information incurs a large signalling overhead. Besides, in reality users might falsely report their private profit information. To overcome this, we further propose a learning-based pricing mechanism where no knowledge of individual user profit functions is required. At equilibrium, the optimal prices and average edge delays are learnt, and users have chosen the correct priority class and offload at the socially optimal frequency.