Computing Resource Provisioning at the Edge: An Overbooking-Enabled Trading Paradigm

The arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT) era calls for cost-effective resource provisioning techniques to secure necessary computing resources in supporting dynamic and computation-intensive applications on diverse IoT devices, where resource trading in edge networks brings a viable prospect. While conventional onsite spot trading may facilitate this paradigm, the inherent extra latency of onsite decision making and unreliable network significantly limit resource trading efficiency and the eventual resource utilization rate. More importantly, the “no show” of confirmed resource buyers incurred by unreliable network conditions, can result in negative impacts on trading performance and resource usage. To this end, resource overbooking is adopted that provides an effective solution in handling “no shows” while substantially improving resource utilization rate. In this article, an interesting overbooking-enabled resource trading paradigm in mobile edge networks is proposed, allowing pre-negotiated forward contracts between the edge server (seller) and a number of overbooked smart devices (buyers), which will be fulfilled during future trading. Specifically, a framework associated with the proposed trading paradigm is introduced first to provide a comprehensive view of the relevant key issues. Then a case study is presented that elaborates how the proposed trading can be implemented in practice. Extensive simulation results and analysis demonstrate that the overbooking-enabled trading paradigm achieves both time and energy efficiency, as well as substantial resource utilization and profit improvements.