Stackelberg differential game based resource sharing in hierarchical fog-cloud computing

The tremendous increase of computation-heavy applications has posed great challenges in terms of enhanced service coverage and high-speed data processing in the Fifth Generation (5G) networks. As responding, the integrated fog and cloud computing (FCC) system has been expected as an efficient approach to support low-latency and on-demand computing services. This work considers the computing resource market in an FCC system operated by one cloud computing service provider (CCP) and multiple fog computing service providers (FCPs), in which the CCP shares its cloud computing resource among FCPs and itself to serve users with computational tasks. To facilitate the resource trading between the CCP and FCPs, a Stackelberg differential game based resource sharing mechanism is proposed. In this mechanism, performance discrepancy is introduced as a penalty factor to denote the mismatch between the resource supply and demand, which will encourage all computing providers (CPs) to make their trading decisions that can truthfully reflect their resource capacity and requirements. In addition, an evolutionary game based replicator dynamics is established to analyze the users' service selection among CPs. Based on the established hierarchical game framework, interactions between user selection and computing resource sharing are investigated. The performance of the designed resource sharing mechanism is validated in the simulations, which also reveal the convergence and equilibrium states of user selection, resource pricing and resource allocation.