MobileCloudSim: A Context-aware Simulation Toolkit for Mobile Computational Offloading

Computational offloading has become an important strategy to augment computational capabilities of resource constrained devices. While several techniques and frameworks have been proposed in the literature, currently quantifying the cost of offloading in the wild remains challenging. Indeed, the performance of computational offloading is affected by contextual factors ranging from network quality to energy consumption of the device and load of the offloading infrastructure. This makes it infeasible for a single device to capture all possible contexts and to make optimal offloading decisions. To improve the design of offloading mechanisms, we propose MobileCloudSim, a novel and innovative context-aware simulation toolkit that can be used to asses the impact of computational offloading in a large-scale variety of complex contexts. Unlike traditional simulators that generate synthetic data, MobileCloudSim relies on crowdsensing to create realistic offloading conditions that characterize different offloading contexts.