Details of Research Outputs

The edge federation meets the needs of different users through resource allocation and service configuration across edge-independent computing providers and clouds, promoting the better collaboration of resources among edge clusters and effectively improving the user service quality. Existing edge federation solutions focus mainly on enabling resource sharing to satisfy users with different resource requirements, ignoring the actual profits of edge service providers (ESPs) and the fact that many resource owners may not be motivated to work with other providers in edge federation environments. In this paper, we are the first to consider a situation in that ESPs rent resources from other ESPs under specific circumstances in edge federation environments, and a reasonable rental price determines the participation and profitability of ESPs. Therefore, we propose three pricing mechanisms based on economic models to reasonably set ESPs’ external rental resources prices to maximize the service providers’ profit. Extensive simulation studies evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithms and revenue models and also demonstrate that pricing mechanism 2 (PriM2) is the closest to the optimal solution, and ESPs adopt PriM2 to bring higher revenue than no pricing mechanism and pricing mechanism 1.