Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack is critical to latency-critical systems such as Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) as it significantly increases the response delay of the victim service. An intrusion prevention system (IPS) is a promising solution to defend against such attacks. Still, there will be a trade-off between IPS deployment and application resource reservation as IPS deployment will reduce the computational resources for MEC applications. In this work, we propose a game-theoretic framework to study the joint computational resource allocation and IPS deployment in the MEC architecture. Given the expected attack strength and end-user demands, we study the pricing strategy of the MEC platform operator (MPO) and purchase strategy of the application service providers (ASPs). The best responses of both MPO and ASPs are derived theoretically. Based on the best responses, we propose an efficient algorithm to derive the Stackelberg equilibrium. The properties and optimality in the efficiency of the equilibrium are analyzed through simulations. The results confirm that the proposed solutions significantly increase the social welfare of the system.

The network attack such as Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack could be critical to latency-critical systems such as Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) as such attacks significantly increase the response delay of the victim service. Intrusion prevention system (IPS) is a promising solution to defend against such attacks, but there will be a trade-off between IPS deployment and application resource reservation as the deployment of IPS will reduce the number of computation resources for MEC applications. In this paper, we proposed a game-theoretic framework to study the joint computation resource allocation and IPS deployment in the MEC architecture. We study the pricing strategy of the MEC platform operator and purchase strategy of the application service provider, given the expected attack strength and end user demands. The best responses of both MPO and ASPs are derived theoretically to identify the Stackelberg equilibrium. The simulation results confirm that the proposed solutions significantly increase the social welfare of the system.