QoE-Driven Spot Pricing Schemes For Edge User Allocation Across the Distributed Cloud-Edge Continuum

In the distributed cloud-edge continuum (CEC), high unpredictability and variability of workloads is a major challenge for an edge service provider (ESP), who wants to achieve an optimal trade-off between the quality of experience (QoE) it offers to its heterogeneous edge users (EUs) and the cost for dynamically renting edge resources. In this paper, we propose QoE-aware spot pricing schemes that align edge users’ incentives with ESP’s system-level objectives. In particular, the proposed personalized spot pricing scheme (PSP) deals with the “tragedy of the commons” phenomenon by applying personalized discounts to elastic EUs according to each one’s individual contribution to overall system’s cost reduction. Simulation results show that PSP affects EUs’ behavior much more efficiently than the state-of-the-art spot pricing scheme by: i) ensuring fair allocation of financial benefits among EUs so that inelastic users do not benefit from the actions of elastic users, ii) considerably reducing system’s cost (from 15% in low elasticity up to 35% in high elasticity scenarios), and iii) negligibly deteriorating aggregated EUs’ welfare up to 2.5%.