Towards resource sharing in mobile device clouds

Abstract

Despite the increased capabilities of mobile devices, mobile application resource requirements can often transcend what can be accomplished on a single device. This has been addressed through several proposals for efficient computation offloading from mobile devices to remote cloud resources or closely located computing resources known as cloudlets. In this paper we consider an environment in which computational offloading is performed among a set of mobile devices. We call this environment a Mobile Device Cloud (MDC). We are interested in MDCs where nodes are {\em highly collaborative}. We develop computational offloading schemes that {\em maximize the lifetime} of the ensemble of mobile devices where we consider the network to be alive as long as no device has depleted its battery. As a secondary contribution in this work, we develop and use an experimentation platform that allows us to evaluate a range of computational models and profiles derived from a realistic testbed. We use this platform as a first step in an evaluation exercise that demonstrates the effectiveness of our computation offloading algorithms in extending the lifetime of an MDC.