Smart Dynamic Pricing and Cooperative Resource Management for Mobility-Aware and Multi-Tier Slice-Enabled 5G and Beyond Networks

In this paper, we propose a novel cooperative resource sharing technique in multi-tier edge slicing networks which is robust to imperfect channel state information (CSI) caused by user equipments’ (UEs) mobility. Due to the mobility of UEs, the dynamic requirements of their tasks, and the limited resources of the network, we propose a smart joint dynamic pricing and resources sharing (SJDPRS) scheme that can incentivize the infrastructure provider (InP) and mobile network operators (MNOs). Aiming to maximize the profits of UEs, MNOs and the InP under the task fulfillment constraints, we formulate an optimization problem by deploying the multi-objective optimization method where in addition to the resource allocation variables, the price values are also the optimization variables. To solve the problem, we adopt a new deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method based on a carefully designed reward function. The simulation results indicate that the proposed resource sharing scenario can increase total profits for the UEs, MNOs, and InP in comparison to non-cooperative case, while also providing almost complete fairness among the players. In particular, as compared to the baselines and benchmarks, the profits for each network component (MNO, InP, and UEs), under fairness considerations, are enhanced by 75%, 79%, and 76%, respectively.