Exploring device-to-device communication for mobile cloud computing

With the popularity of smartphones and explosion of mobile applications, mobile devices become the prevalent computing platform for convenient communication and rich entertainment. Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is proposed to overcome the limited resources of mobile systems. However, when users access MCC through wireless networks, cellular network is likely to be overloaded and Wi-Fi connectivity is intermittent. Therefore, device-to-device (D2D) communication is exploited as an alternative for MCC. An important issue in exploring D2D communication for MCC is how users can detect and utilize the computing resources on other mobile devices. In this paper, we propose two mobile cloud access schemes: optimal and periodic access schemes, and study the corresponding performance of mobile cloud computing (i.e., mobile cloud size, node´s serviceable time percentage, and task success rate). We find that optimally, node´s serviceable time percentage and task success rate approach 1. Using more practical periodic access scheme, node´s serviceable time percentage and task success rate are determined by the ratio of contact and inter-contact time between two nodes.