A Game-theoretic Approach Towards Collaborative Coded Computation Offloading

Coded distributed computing (CDC) has emerged as a promising approach because it enables computation tasks to be carried out in a distributed manner while mitigating straggler effects, which often account for the long overall completion times. Specifically, by using polynomial codes, computed results from only a subset of edge servers can be used to reconstruct the final result. However, incentive issues have not been studied systematically for the edge servers to complete the CDC tasks. In this paper, we propose a tractable two-level game-theoretic approach to incentivize the edge servers to complete the CDC tasks. Specifically, in the lower level, a hedonic coalition formation game is formulated where the edge servers share their resources within their coalitions. By forming coalitions, the edge servers have more Central Processing Unit (CPU) power to complete the computation tasks. In the upper level, given the CPU power of the coalitions of edge servers, an all-pay auction is designed to incentivize the edge servers to participate in the CDC tasks. In the all-pay auction, the bids of the edge servers are represented by the allocation of their CPU power to the CDC tasks. The all-pay auction is designed to maximize the utility of the cloud server by determining the allocation of rewards to the winners. Simulation results show that the edge servers are incentivized to allocate more CPU power when multiple rewards are offered, i.e., there are multiple winners, instead of rewarding only the edge server with the largest CPU power allocation. Besides, the utility of the cloud server is maximized when it offers multiple homogeneous rewards, instead of heterogeneous rewards.