QoS-enhanced bandwidth reallocation mechanism based on auction model in mobile clouds

Abstract

In recent years, mobile cloud has become a promising platform to offer elastic and scalable service for our daily life. Even so, the features of mobile communication introduce a series of new challenges to conventional bandwidth allocation service. In this paper, we propose an auction-based bandwidth reallocation mechanism to handle the bandwidth shifting issue which may significantly degrade user's QoS satisfactory. To take both resource provider's revenue and user's QoS requirement into consideration, we formulate the bandwidth reallocation problem as constrained optimisation problem, and then design an auction model which introduces a trade-off parameter to adjust the auction price with aiming at improving the user QoS satisfactory in terms of resource cost. Theoretical analysis indicates that the proposed auction model is capable of balancing the benefits between cloud providers and mobile users. Performance evaluation in a realistic mobile cloud shows that the proposed bandwidth reallocation mechanism outperforms existing approaches in terms of various performance metrics.