Mutualistic Compute Continuum: A Network Economics Analysis

In the transformative data-driven era, Compute Continuum - consisting of the edge, fog and cloud - has been introduced as a viable long-term economic model. In this setting the problem of utilizing the appropriate compute resources at optimal processing points (edge, fog, cloud) in the system, becomes of paramount importance. In this paper, we address this issue by introducing the novel concept of mutualistic computing. Specifically, we do not simply account for the interactions among the involved actors, but we consider that the edge, fog, and the cloud computing providers establish an obligate symbiosis with the users in order to serve their computing demands. A network economics-based analysis is introduced in order to jointly enable the computing providers and the users to maximize their profit and utility, respectively. Two pricing models are studied to determine the computing providers' optimal prices in terms of maximizing their profit. The first one - free market pricing model - enables the full competition among the computing providers and is formulated as a non-cooperative game among the computing providers. The second one - oligopoly pricing - is introduced among the cloud computing provider (leader) and the edge, fog computing providers (followers), and is treated via a Stackelberg game. The performance evaluation of the proposed approach is achieved via modeling and simulation, and the tradeoffs of the two different pricing models within the mutualistic computing paradigm are highlighted.