In mobile Internet ecosystem, Mobile Users (MUs) purchase wireless data services from Internet Service Provider (ISP) to access to Internet and acquire the interested content services (e.g., online game) from Content Provider (CP). The popularity of intelligent functions (e.g., AI and 3D modeling) increases the computation-intensity of the content services, leading to a growing computation pressure for the MUs' resource-limited devices. To this end, edge computing service is emerging as a promising approach to alleviate the MUs' computation pressure while keeping their quality-of-service, via offloading some computation tasks of MUs to edge (computing) servers deployed at the local network edge. Thus, Edge Service Provider (ESP), who deploys the edge servers and offers the edge computing service, becomes an upcoming new stakeholder in the ecosystem. In this work, we study the economic interactions of MUs, ISP, CP, and ESP in the new ecosystem with edge computing service, where MUs can acquire the computation-intensive content services (offered by CP) and offload some computation tasks, together with the necessary raw input data, to edge servers (deployed by ESP) through ISP. We first study the MU's Joint Content Acquisition and Task Offloading (J-CATO) problem, which aims to maximize his long-term payoff. We derive the off-line solution with crucial insights, based on which we design an online strategy with provable performance. Then, we study the ESP's edge service monetization problem. We propose a pricing policy that can achieve a constant fraction of the ex-post optimal revenue with an extra constant loss for the ESP. Numerical results show that the edge computing service can stimulate the MUs' content acquisition and improve the payoffs of MUs, ISP, and CP.

中文翻译：

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在移动互联网生态系统中货币化边缘服务

在移动互联网生态系统中，移动用户（MU）通过向互联网服务提供商（ISP）购买无线数据服务来访问互联网，并从内容提供商（CP）处获取感兴趣的内容服务（如在线游戏）。智能功能（例如，AI 和 3D 建模）的普及增加了内容服务的计算强度，导致 MU 资源有限设备的计算压力越来越大。为此，边缘计算服务正在成为一种有前途的方法，通过将 MU 的一些计算任务卸载到部署在本地网络边缘的边缘（计算）服务器，来减轻 MU 的计算压力，同时保持其服务质量。因此，部署边缘服务器并提供边缘计算服务的边缘服务提供商 (ESP)，成为生态系统中即将到来的新利益相关者。在这项工作中，我们研究了 MU、ISP、CP 和 ESP 在具有边缘计算服务的新生态系统中的经济交互，其中 MU 可以获得计算密集型内容服务（由 CP 提供）并卸载一些计算任务，以及必要的原始输入数据，通过 ISP 发送到边缘服务器（由 ESP 部署）。我们首先研究 MU 的联合内容获取和任务卸载 (J-CATO) 问题，该问题旨在最大化其长期收益。我们得出具有关键洞察力的离线解决方案，并在此基础上设计具有可证明性能的在线策略。然后，我们研究 ESP 的边缘服务货币化问题。我们提出了一种定价政策，可以在 ESP 的额外恒定损失的情况下实现事后最佳收入的恒定比例。