An Offloading Strategy in Mobile Cloud Computing Considering Energy and Delay Constraints

Abstract

With the expansion of wireless networks throughout the world and the high growth rate of the use of sophisticated programs in mobile devices, users’ expectations for the services provided by these devices have increased. Mobile devices have some limitations, such as battery life time and processing power for delivering all types of services to users. In recent years, mobile cloud computing, which is a phenomenal branch of cloud computing, has achieved considerable evolution in the computing community. By considering the advantage of offloading to the cloud, the limitations of mobile devices can be overcome to a great extent. A mobile device can be converted to a powerful device by applying cloud resources. The outstanding challenges in offloading are finding an optimum solution for the offloading problem to overcome these limitations. In this paper, offloading is modeled via a mathematical graph where both Wi-Fi and 3G links are topics of concern. Finding the best solution for offloading is equivalent to finding the constrained shortest path in this graph. By considering the K-LARAC and M-LARAC heuristic algorithms, a new heuristic algorithm is introduced to find the optimized path that can assess energy and delay, at a minimum, financial cost. This path is an appropriate solution for the offloading problem. The obtained results indicate that the designed algorithm can find an arbitrary approximation solution for the offloading problem with low complexity in comparison to existing algorithms.