Context‐awareness over transient cloud in D2D networks: energy performance analysis and evaluation

Abstract

AbstractThe exponential increase in the number and types of mobile devices, along with their ever‐growing sets of capabilities, have enabled the development of new architectures that aim to harness such heterogeneity. Transient clouds are examples of mobile clouds, which are created on‐the‐fly by the devices present in an environment to share their physical resources (e.g. CPU, memory and network) and would disappear as the nodes leave the network. They enable a device to go beyond its own physical limitations through utilising the capabilities offered by nearby devices over an ad hoc network. This idea exploits the device‐to‐device (D2D) communications paradigm, which allows two nearby devices to communicate with each other in the licenced cellular bandwidth without a base station involved.In this paper, we present a transient context‐aware cloud (TCAC) paradigm based on the assumption that the nodes of the network care more about providing/learning higher level functionalities rather than lower level capabilities in D2D scenario. The proposed architecture, realised by using a WiFi Direct, can be portable through any paradigm, which exploits the D2D communications, so opening the doors to forthcoming 5G scenarios.We present a prototype implementation of our architecture over Android smartphones connected via WiFi Direct along with the performance metrics (power/energy consumption and accuracy) to show the benefits of TCAC. A theoretical and analytical model for the energy consumption related to a device within the TCAC is provided as well. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.