A Novel Incentive Mechanism Based on Repeated Game in Fog Computing

Fog computing is a new computing paradigm that utilizes numerous mutually cooperating terminal devices or network edge devices to provide computing, storage, and communication services. Fog computing extends cloud computing services to the edge of the network, making up for the deficiencies of cloud computing in terms of location awareness, mobility support and latency. However, fog nodes are not active enough to perform tasks, and fog nodes recruited by cloud service providers cannot provide stable and continuous resources, which limits the development of fog computing. In the process of cloud service providers using the resources in the fog nodes to provide services to users, the cloud service providers and fog nodes are selfish and committed to maximizing their own payoffs. This situation makes it easy for the fog node to work negatively during the execution of the task. Limited by the low quality of resource provided by fog nodes, the payoff of cloud service providers has been severely affected. In response to this problem, an appropriate incentive mechanism needs to be established in the fog computing environment to solve the core problems faced by both cloud service providers and fog nodes in maximizing their respective utility, in order to achieve the incentive effect. Therefore, this paper proposes an incentive model based on repeated game, and designs a trigger strategy with credible threats, and obtains the conditions for incentive consistency. Under this condition, the fog node will be forced by the deterrence of the trigger strategy to voluntarily choose the strategy of actively executing the task, so as to avoid the loss of subsequent rewards when it is found to perform the task passively. Then, using evolutionary game theory to analyze the stability of the trigger strategy, it proves the dynamic validity of the incentive consistency condition.