A distributed game theoretical approach for credibility-guaranteed multimedia data offloading in MEC

Due to the limited resources of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the multimedia application data generated by IoT devices can be offloaded to edge servers for processing. In this paper, we study the credibility-guaranteed multimedia application data offloading problem in MEC systems. Each IoT device competes for the limited transmission resources while ensuring that the credibility requirement is satisfied. We formulate the credible offloading problem with the goal of maximizing Quality of Experience (QoE) for resource-constrained devices. Each IoT device focuses on maximizing its own QoE. The constraints include credibility constraint and resource constraint. We reformulate the problem as a credibility-guaranteed multimedia data offloading game (CMDO-Game). It is proved that for any IoT device, there is an upper bound of communication interference. Based on this property, we further theoretically prove that there is at least one Nash equilibrium offloading strategy in the CMDO-Game. We propose a game-based credible data offloading (GCDO) method to obtain the Nash equilibrium offloading strategy in a distributed way. Finally, the proposed GCDO method is compared with various approximation methods, and a series of experimental results are given.