On the Economics of Fog Computing: Inter-Play among Infrastructure and Service Providers, Users, and Edge Resource Owners

Abstract

Fog computing is a paradigm which brings computing, storage, and networking closer to end users and devices for better service provisioning. One of the crucial factors towards the success of fog computing is how to incentivize the individual users' edge resources, thereby opening the era of user- participated fog computing. In this paper, we provide an economic analysis of such user-oriented fog computing by modeling a market consisting of ISP (Infrastructure and Service Provider), SUs (end Service Users), and EROs (Edge Resource Owners) as a noncooperative game. In this market, ISP, which provides a platform of fog computing, behaves as a mediator or a broker to lease the edge resources from EROs and provide various services to SUs. In our game formulation, a two-stage dynamic game is used, where in each stage there exists another dynamic game, one for between ISP and EROs and another for between ISP and SUs, to model the market more practically. Despite this complex game structure, we provide a closed- form equilibrium analysis, which gives an insight of how much economic benefits are obtained by ISP, SUs, and EROs under what conditions.