Utility-based Uploading Strategy in Cloud Scenarios

There is a great potential to boost the performance of mobile devices by offloading computation-intensive parts of mobile applications to the cloud. However, this potential is hindered by a gap between how individual mobile devices demand computational resources and how cloud providers offer them: offloading requests from a mobile device usually require a quick response, which may be infrequent, and is subject to variable network connectivity, whereas cloud resources incur relatively long setup times, are leased for long time quanta, and are indifferent to network connectivity. In this paper, we present the design of utility-based uploads sharing strategy in cloud scenarios, which bridges the above gap through providing computation offloading as a service to mobile devices. Our scheme efficiently manages cloud resources for offloading requests to improve offloading performances of mobile devices, as well as to reduce the monetary cost per request of the provider. We also schedule offloading requests to resolve the contention problem for cloud resources. The proposed scheme makes offloading decisions with a controlled risk to overcome the uncertainties caused by variable network connectivity and program execution. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can reduce the costs of cloud resources and enable mobile computation speedup for mobile devices.