Dual-side dynamic controls for cost minimization in mobile cloud computing systems

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) has been proposed to offload heavy computing jobs of mobile devices to cloud servers managed by cloud service provider (CSP), which enables the mobile devices to save energy and processing delay. Heretofore, cloud offloading policies in mobile devices and pricing/scheduling in CSP have been independently addressed. This paper is first to jointly account for both sides of mobile users and CSP in a unified mobile cloud computing framework. By invoking “Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty” technique, we propose dual-side control algorithms for the mobile users and CSP in two different scenarios: (i) In non-cooperation scenario, we propose a NC-UC algorithm for the mobile users and a NC-CC algorithm for the CSP to minimize each cost for given delay constraints. (ii) In cooperation scenario, we suggest a CP-JC algorithm for both cloud users and CSP to minimize the sum costs of them for given delay constraints. Trace-driven simulations demonstrate that NC-UC saves minimum 63% of cost by trading 8MB of average queue lengths when compared with the existing algorithms, and NC-CC achieves 71% of profit gain when compared with the same delay of existing scheme; moreover, the cooperation enables them to save additional costs and delays.