  In 5G and beyond, the newly emerging services, such as edge
computing/intelligence services, may demand the provision of heterogeneous
communications, computing, and storage (CCS) resources on and across network
entities multihop apart. In such cases, traditional resource-oriented auction
schemes, where buyers place bids on resources, may not be effective in
providing end-to-end (E2E) quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. To overcome
these limitations, in this article, we coin the concept of E2E service auction
where the auction commodities are E2E services rather than certain resource.
Under this framework, buyers simply bid for services with E2E QoS requirements
without having to know the inner working (which resources are behind). To
guarantee E2E QoS for winning bids while ensuring essential economic
properties, E2E service auction requires addressing the joint problem of
network optimization and auction design with both economical and QoS
constraints. To substantiate the mechanism design, we illustrate how to devise
E2E service auctions for edge computing systems under various scenarios. We
also identify the research opportunities on E2E service auction mechanism
design for other critical use cases, including edge intelligence.
