Mobile cloud computing (MCC) has been used to address the resource limitation of mobile devices by migrating expensive local computations to the cloud. However, transmitting data wirelessly from mobile devices to the cloud also consumes energy. Hence, the key problem of MCC is how to minimize the energy consumption while preserving the mobile application performance. Different from traditional solutions which focus on reducing the cost of wireless transmission solely from the application perspective, this project focuses on designing MCC schemes from a network-centric perspective, by investigating, formulating, and mitigating the impact of special characteristics of wireless networks on the energy efficiency of MCC. The proposed research could benefit end users with various mobile devices by extending their battery lifetime and improving their performance. The results from this research are likely to foster new research directions on supporting MCC from a network-centric perspective. The project will engage under-represented students in the proposed research, and the scholarly discovery of this project will be disseminated broadly to the community.
This project aims to improve the performance of MCC by mitigating the impacts of two special characteristics of wireless networks: the long-tail problem at the wireless interface and the quality variations of the wireless link. More specifically, this project consists of three closely intertwined research thrusts: (i) reducing the amount of tail energy when transmitting the program states to the remote cloud, while ensuring that the performance requirements of mobile applications can be met; (ii) mitigating the impact of wireless link quality on both energy and performance, and minimizing the degradation of application performance when the wireless link quality is low; and (iii) exploiting the difference of wireless link quality among mobile users to further improve the energy efficiency of MCC via user cooperation. An experimental testbed will be developed to investigate the practical impact of wireless network characteristics on MCC and evaluate the proposed MCC schemes.
