ICoMe: A novel incentivized cooperative mobile resource management mechanism

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel cooperative resource management mechanism in mobile cloud computing environment. This mechanism is based on cooperation between mobile devices using their short range radio technology such as WiFi with the goal of maximizing the revenue of the cellular service provider. Users with poor cellular link quality connect with nearby devices through their WiFi interface. The service provider provides incentives to mobile devices to motivate them to contribute in such cooperative scheme. We first formulate the resource management problem as a mixed integer linear programming model. The optimal solution has an NP-hard complexity. To tackle the complexity of the problem, we then propose iCoMe, which is an Incentivized Cooperative MobilE resource management mechanism. The resource management problem in iCoMe is solved distributively by the service provider and mobile devices. We prove that iCoMe has a polynomial time computational complexity. Simulation results confirm the close to optimal performance of iCoMe. Results also show that our proposed mechanism considerably increases the revenue of the service provider compared to non-cooperative schemes.