A dual mode self-adaption handoff for multimedia services in mobile cloud computing environment

Since mobile devices are becoming the primary platforms for many users who always roam around and access the cloud computing applications, the two concepts of mobile computing and cloud computing have emerged as a new widely accepted paradigm, mobile cloud computing. More and more users use cloud computing service and offload their local applications to the cloud. Unfortunately, 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 availability and service usage times in mobile cloud computing scenarios. To improve handoff quality and minimize utilized bandwidth, we propose a dual mode self-adaption handoff mechanism for multimedia services in mobile cloud computing environment. The new mechanism uses multipath transmission for media flows based on "make before break" technology, 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 mechanism. The results demonstrate that the self-adaption handoff 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.