COVID-19 Networking Demand: An Auction-Based Mechanism for Automated Selection of Edge Computing Services

Network and cloud service providers are facing an unprecedented challenge to meet the demand of end-users during the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, billions of people around the world are ordered to stay at home and use remote connection technologies to prevent the spread of the disease. The COVID-19 crisis brought a new reality to network service providers that will eventually accelerate the deployment of edge computing resources to attract the massive influx of users' traffic. The user can elect to procure its resource needs from any edge computing provider based on a variety of attributes such as price and quality. The main challenge for the user is how to choose between the price and multiple quality of service deals when such offerings are changing continually. This problem falls under multi-attribute decision-making. This paper investigates and proposes a novel auction mechanism by which network service brokers would be able to automate the selection of edge computing offers to support their end-users. We also propose a multi-attribute decision-making model that allows the broker to maximize its utility when several bids from edge-network providers are present. The evaluation and experimentation show the practicality and robustness of the proposed model.