Incentive-Driven Task Allocation for Collaborative Edge Computing in Industrial Internet of Things

Residing in the proximity of end devices, edge computing (EC) holds great potential to provide low-latency, energy-efficient, and secure services, which has become an essential part of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). To future accelerate task processing and reduce service latency, this work proposes an online incentive-driven task allocation scheme to stimulate collaborative computing among EC servers and IIoT devices. To better serve dynamic and heterogeneous tasks in terms of profiles and importance, EC servers (including neighboring servers) and IIoT devices with available resources can cooperatively process the tasks. Considering the heterogeneity of computing resources in edge servers and industrial IoT devices, we formulate a task allocation problem, which is NP hard. An online incentive-driven task allocation algorithm is proposed to this NP-hard problem, which will optimize task assignment strategies to maximize system utility, promote faster computing, and stimulate collaborative computing. Theoretical analyses show that the online incentive algorithm can satisfy incentive compatibility, individual rationality, computational efficiency, and feasibility. The results demonstrate that the proposed task allocation scheme with collaborative EC achieves superior performance and effectiveness.