Paying Less for More? Combo Plans for Edge-Computing Services

Due to the strong potential of edge computing, service providers are aware of its excellent market opportunity. In this paper, we examine new pricing plans for edge-computing services that jointly consider communication and computing costs in mobile devices and edge servers. In our proposed model, users can freely choose to use: 1) a pay-as-you-go payment for communication and computing costs, 2) an upfront data plan for unlimited communication volume, 3) an upfront computing plan for unlimited computing workload, or 4) a combo plan for unlimited communication volume and computing workload. Based on this, we design a smart plan-purchasing scheme, namely smart online reservation (SOR) scheme for users and prove it achieves the best possible competitive ratio among all possible online deterministic schemes. With SOR adopted by users, we develop pricing plan guidelines for service providers to achieve profitability by motivating users to purchase the combo plan. We provide trace-driven simulations to verify the advantage of SOR and identify how different prices influence user behavior.