CrowdBox: Crowdsourced Network‐in‐Box Recruitment for Edge Computing‐Enabled Industrial Internet of Things

Abstract

The rapidly increasing number of smart devices deployed in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environment has been witnessed. To improve communication efficiency, edge computing‐enabled Industrial Internet of Things (E‐IIoT) has gained attention recently. Nevertheless, E‐IIoT still cannot conquer the rapidly increasing communication demands when hundreds of millions of IIoT devices are connected at the same time. Considering the future 6G environment where smart network‐in‐box (NIB) nodes are everywhere (e.g., deployed in vehicles, buses, backpacks, etc.), we propose a crowdsourcing‐based recruitment framework, leveraging the power of the crowd to provide extra communication resources and enhance the communication capabilities. We creatively treat NIB nodes as edge layer devices, and CrowdBox is devised using a Stackelberg game where the E‐IIoT system is the leader, and the NIB nodes are the followers. CrowdBox can calculate the optimal reward to reach the unique Stackelberg equilibrium where the utility of E‐IIoT can be maximized while none of the NIB nodes can improve its utility by deviating from its strategy. Finally, we evaluate the performance of CrowdBox with extensive simulations with various settings, and it shows that CrowdBox outperforms the compared algorithms in improving system utility and attracting more NIB nodes.