Robust Computation Offloading and Resource Scheduling in Cloudlet-Based Mobile Cloud Computing

Abstract

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) as an emerging computing paradigm enables mobile devices to offload their computation tasks to nearby resource-rich cloudlets so as to augment computation capability and reduce energy consumption of mobile devices. However, due to the mobility of mobile devices and the admission of cloudlets, the connection between mobile devices and cloudlets may be unstable, which will affect offloading decision, even cause offloading failure. To address such an issue, in this paper, we propose a robust computation offloading strategy with failure recovery (RoFFR) in an intermittently connected cloudlet system aiming to reduce energy consumption and shorten application completion time. We first provide an optimal cloudlet selection policy when multiple cloudlets are available near mobile devices. Furthermore, we formulate the RoFFR problem as two optimization problems, i.e., local execution cost minimization problem and offloading execution cost minimization problem while satisfying the task-dependency requirement and application completion deadline constraint. By solving both optimization problems, we present a distributed RoFFR algorithm for CPU clock frequency configuration in local execution and transmission power allocation and data rate control in cloudlet execution. Experimental results in a real testbed show that our distributed RoFFR algorithm outperforms several baseline policies and existing offloading schemes in terms of application completion cost and offloading data rate.