A review on the computation offloading approaches in mobile edge computing: A game-theoretic perspective

In recent years, novel mobile applications such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and three-dimensional gaming, running on handy mobile devices have been pervasively popular. With rapid developments of such mobile applications, decentralized mobile edge computing (MEC) as an emerging distributed computing paradigm is developed for serving them near the smart devices, usually in one hop, to meet their computation, and delay requirements. In the literature, offloading mechanisms are designed to execute such mobile applications in the MEC environments through transferring resource-intensive tasks to the MEC servers. On the other hand, due to the resource limitations, resource heterogeneity, dynamic nature, and unpredictable behavior of MEC environments, it is necessary to consider the computation offloading issues as the challenging problem in the MEC environment. However, to the best of our knowledge, despite its importance, there is not any systematic, comprehensive, and detailed survey in game theory (GT)-based computation offloading mechanisms in the MEC environment. In this article, we provide a systematic literature review on the GT-based computation offloading approaches in the MEC environment in the form of a classical taxonomy to recognize the state-of-the-art mechanisms on this important topic and to provide open issues as well. The proposed taxonomy is classified into four main fields: classical game mechanisms, auction theory, evolutionary game mechanisms, and hybrid-base game mechanisms. Next, these classes are compared with each other according to the important factors such as performance metrics, case studies, utilized techniques, and evaluation tools, and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed, as well. Finally, open issues and future uncovered or weakly covered research challenges are discussed and the survey is concluded.