Stochastic Digital-Twin Service Demand With Edge Response: An Incentive-Based Congestion Control Approach

The emergence of Digital Twin Edge Networks (DTENs) achieves the mapping of real physical entities to digital models of cyberspace. By offloading real-time mobile data to Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) servers for processing and modeling, communication-efficient Digital Twin (DT) services could be achieved. However, the spatio-temporal dynamic DT service demand stochastically generated by mobile users easily causes service congestion, which challenges the long-term DT service stability. Meanwhile, current DT services still lack long-term effective incentive designs for participants. To solve these issues, we design an incentive-based congestion control scheme for stochastic demand response in DTENs. First, we adopt the Lyapunov optimization theory to decompose the long-term congestion control decision into a sequence of online edge association decisions, with no need for future system information. We then present a contract-based incentive design to optimize the long-term profit of the DT service provider, comprehensively considering the delay sensitivity, incentive compatibility, and individual rationality. Finally, experimental simulations are carried out to verify the superiority of the proposed scheme with the base station dataset of Shanghai Telecom. Theoretical and simulation analysis demonstrates that compared with benchmarks, our scheme could effectively avoid long-term service congestion with an arbitrarily near-optimal profit.