Energy-efficient Load-balanced Heterogeneous Mobile Cloud

Abstract

Today's integration of mobile technologies and traditional cloud computing exploits the abundant computation and storage resources in the cloud, to enhance the capabilities of end-user mobile devices. The designs that rely on remote cloud services, however, sometimes overlook the abundant resources (e.g., storage, communication, and computation) on mobile devices. In particular, when the remote cloud services are unavailable (due to service downtime or network issues), these smart devices can no longer function. We propose a Heterogeneous Mobile Cloud (HMC) computing design that efficiently utilizes the communication and computation resources to support data storage and data processing services in a group of mobile devices. Each mobile device may have different energy, communication and computation capabilities, but our Mobile Storage & Processing System (MSPS) ensures that: i) the communication and computation tasks are executed in an energy-efficient manner, ii) task allocation considers device heterogeneity and achieves system-wide load balancing, and iii) the stored data are fault-tolerant. Through extensive simulations and real hardware implementations on Android devices, we demonstrate the performance and feasibility of deploying MSPS in a real heterogeneous mobile environment.