Performance analysis of fault-tolerant offloading systems for pervasive services in mobile wireless environments

Offloading (also known cyber-foraging) is an approach to leverage the severity of resource constrained nature of mobile devices (such as PDAs) by migrating part of the computation of applications to some nearby resource-rich surrogates (e.g., desktop PCs). It is an essential mechanism for the execution of pervasive applications. However, the mobile nature of mobile devices and the unstable connectivity of wireless links all render a less predictability of the performance of a pervasive application running under the control of offloading systems. This paper proposes an analytical model to express the performance of fault-tolerant offloading systems in mobile wireless environments. We model the failure recovery time and total execution time of pervasive applications that run under the control of the fault-tolerant offloading systems. The model is analyzed numerically and primarily evaluated based on a real application.