Cooperative Runtime Offloading Decision Algorithm for Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) provides a platform for resource-constrained mobile devices to offload their tasks. MCC has the characteristics of cloud computing and its own features such as mobility and wireless data transmission, which bring new challenges to offloading decision for MCC. However, most existing works on offloading decision assume that mobile cloud environments are stable and only focus on optimizing the consumption of offloaded applications but ignore the consumption caused by offloading decision algorithms themselves. This paper focuses on runtime offloading decision in dynamic mobile cloud environments with the consideration of reducing the offloading decision algorithm’s consumption. A cooperative runtime offloading decision algorithm, which takes advantage of the cooperation of online machine learning and genetic algorithm to make offloading decisions, is proposed to address this problem. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm helps offloaded applications save more energy and time while consuming fewer computing resources.