Efficient Allocation of Resource-Intensive Mobile Cyber–Physical Social System Applications on a Heterogeneous Mobile Ad Hoc Cloud

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc cloud (MAC) is one of the key enabling technologies for realizing mobile cyber-physical–social systems (MCPSSs). A MAC is a distributed computing infrastructure that enables mobile devices to share computing resources in an ad hoc environment. Resource allocation is one of the key components of MAC and plays a vital role in system and application performance. Existing resource allocation schemes are designed to utilize single wireless communication technology (WCT) or rely on an eclectic system that exclusively selects single communication technology. Moreover, these schemes do not consider link lifetime, which significantly affects application performance. Consequently, these schemes cannot satisfy low latency and high data rate requirements of emerging resource-intensive MCPSS applications, such as merged reality-based multiplayer games. Thus, this work proposes a new resource allocation scheme that simultaneously uses multiple WCTs and considers link lifetime during the resource allocation process. This study also proposes a Markov chain-based link lifetime prediction mechanism. In comparison with existing mechanisms, the proposed link lifetime prediction mechanism considers the history of a user's visited locations and time spent at each location. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated in a wide range of network and application scenarios using Network Simulator 3.