# Joint Pricing, Server Orchestration and Network Slice Deployment in Mobile Edge Computing Networks
## 6 Performance Evaluation
### Performance Comparison
PD-AAS-SD has the lowest utility because it activates too many servers. Meanwhile, PD-JSP2 and PD-SO-MSNR have high revenue, so their utility is higher. Moreover, in comparison with WOP-JSOSD, PD-JSOSD performs better, which highlights that the proposed IPL-dominated pricing game can effectively improve the utility of the IPL. For the IPL, although both PD-JSP\({}^{2}\) and PD-SO-MSNR could have better utility, these two options are not advantageous for the NPL and the RAL. In order to further analyze the advantages of the proposed JSOSD in the NPL and the RAL, we set all the price levels as fixed to 1 to verify the performance of JSOSD. We present the average user cost, the average delay proportion and the utility of the NPL and the RAL under different maximum numbers of users in Figure 10 and compare JSOSD with AAS-SD, SO-MSNR and JSP\({}^{2}\):  
* **Average User Cost:** It is clear that the deployment costs of access functions and VNF chains have a greater impact on the average user cost than the resource cost. At the start, the average user costs of JSOSD and AAS-SD decrease quickly as the number of users increases. The essential reason is that when the number of users is small, there is no need to deploy additional access functions and VNF chains, and an elevated number of users means more users to divide the deployment cost, so the average user cost goes down significantly. As the number of users continues to grow, more access functions and VNF chains are required, so the downward trend in average user cost slows down. A similar phenomenon occurred in SO-MSNR. The difference is that SO-MSNR's access function deployment cost has already been fixed, and as the network load rises, SO-MSNR only needs to deploy more VNF chains, so the downward trend of SO-MSNR is more obvious than that in JSOSD and AAS-SD. Similarly, the deployment costs of access functions and VNF chains in JSP\({}^{2}\) are both fixed values, and thus, JSP\({}^{2}\) has the greatest decline. * **Average Delay Proportion:** AAS-SD has the lowest delay proportion, which is because servers are associated with base stations one-to-one, and thus, the propagation delay from base stations to servers is zero. In addition, the average delay proportions of AAS-PD and JSP\({}^{2}\) remain stable. We attribute this to the fact that the fixed server activation and association scheme makes the propagation delay less variable. As for JSOSD and SO-MSNR, their server orchestration schemes differ with varying network loads, so their average delay proportion changes significantly. The utility is a weighting of average user cost and average delay proportion, so the changes in the average delay proportion can be influenced by two factors simultaneously. One is that the decrease in average user cost may allow space for more allocated resources and lower delay. The other is that as the network load increases, more users compete for resources, driving the delay higher. In JSOSD, when the number of users is small, the average user cost decreases rapidly, so the average delay proportion decreases. However, as the number of users increases, the average delay proportion is more affected by resource constraints because the decrease in average user cost is not significant, and therefore, the delay tends to increase. This reason can also explain the trend of SO-MSNR. Figure 9: System performance comparison in terms of (**a**) number of activation servers, (**b**) revenue of the IPL and (**c**) utility of the IPL with different maximum numbers of users. * **Utility of the NPL and RAL:** When compared with AAS-SD, SO-MSNR and JSP2, JSOSD has higher utility, which validates the superiority and necessity of the proposed server orchestration scheme and slice deployment scheme. It is worth noting that JSOSD and AAS-SD have almost the same utility when the number of users is low, and the advantage of JSOSD begins to emerge as the number of users rises.