Mobile clouds: Comparative study of architectures and formation mechanisms

In this paper, we investigate cooperative architectures and cloud formation mechanisms within the concept of mobile clouds, where multi-standard multi-radio devices in close proximity communicate to each other over short-range radio links while preserving connectivity to the overlay cellular network. Four architecture approaches are considered, namely a central cellular controlled, a cloud leader based as well as two novel hybrid schemes. We develop models and derive analytical expressions for the performance of the studied architectures. The performance of cloud formation mechanisms for these architectures is then compared. We show that the proposed hybrid mechanisms outperform the basic approaches in terms of control message overhead, cloud formation latency and energy consumption.