A Self-adaption Handoff Mechanism for Multimedia Services in Mobile Cloud Computing

Developing mobile multimedia cloud services over heterogeneous wireless networks poses a challenge for service continuity. The degraded link quality and connection losses are likely to happen and these may affect service execution times and service availability in mobile cloud computing scenarios. To improve handoff quality and minimize utilized bandwidth, we propose a self-adaption handoff scheme for multimedia services in mobile cloud computing. The proposed scheme uses multipath transmission for media flows, and consists of the duplicate mode and the effective mode, which are changed according to the network condition. Analytic model and simulation are developed to investigate our new scheme. The results demonstrate that the new mechanism can realize seamless handoff for multimedia services in cloud, reduce the packet loss rate, as well as obtain a more efficient use of the scarce wireless bandwidth and the power of mobile devices.