Delay-sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) applications have drawn significant attention. Running many of these applications on IoT devices is challenging due to the limited processing resources of these devices and the need for real-time responses. Task offloading can minimize latency by transferring computationally intensive tasks from IoT devices to resource-rich edge servers, ensuring delay and performance guarantees. In this paper, we develop a task-offloading approach for delay-sensitive IoT applications in edge computing environments. Unlike existing schemes, we model the task offloading problem as an economic demand and supply model to achieve market balance. The proposed model avoids under- and over-supply, ensuring the computational resources at edge servers (supply) are allocated in a manner that best meets the processing and computational needs of user devices (demand). Given the multi-agent nature of task offloading involving users and service providers with different preferences and objectives, we design a game-theoretic framework using a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction. This framework analyzes agent interactions and decision-making processes. Additionally, we develop an incentive mechanism to encourage both parties to participate in the auction. The mechanism maximizes user task offloading to edge servers and motivates edge servers to share their computational resources, achieving profitability for both IoT users and edge servers. Simulations demonstrate our method maximizes social welfare, ensures truthfulness, maintains market balance, and provides latency guarantees for delay-sensitive IoT applications.

翻译：时延敏感的物联网应用已引起广泛关注。由于物联网设备处理资源有限且需实时响应，在这些设备上运行大量此类应用具有挑战性。任务卸载通过将计算密集型任务从物联网设备转移至资源丰富的边缘服务器，可最小化时延，确保延迟与性能保障。本文针对边缘计算环境中的时延敏感物联网应用，提出一种任务卸载方法。与现有方案不同，我们将任务卸载问题建模为经济供需模型以实现市场均衡。该模型避免供给不足或过剩，确保边缘服务器的计算资源以最优方式满足用户设备的处理与计算需求。鉴于任务卸载涉及具有不同偏好与目标的用户和服务提供商等多智能体特性，我们设计了一种基于维克里-克拉克-格罗夫斯拍卖的博弈论框架，用于分析智能体交互与决策过程。此外，我们开发了一种激励机制，以鼓励双方参与拍卖。该机制最大化用户向边缘服务器卸载任务，并激励边缘服务器共享其计算资源，实现物联网用户与边缘服务器的双赢。仿真结果表明，我们的方法能最大化社会福利，确保真实性，维持市场均衡，并为时延敏感物联网应用提供延迟保障。