Incentive-based resource management in pervasive mobile cloud computing

Cloud computing is a promising technique to conquer the resource limitations of a single mobile device. To relieve the work load of mobile users, computation-intensive tasks are proposed to be offloaded to the remote cloud or local Cloudlet. However, these solutions also face some challenges. It is difficult to support data intensive and delay-sensitive applications in the remote cloud, while the local Cloudlets often have limited coverage. When both of these methods cannot be supported, another option is to relieve the load of a single device by taking advantage of resources of surrounding smart-phones or other wireless devices. To facilitate the efficient operation of the third option, we propose a novel pervasive mobile cloud framework to provide an incentive mechanism to motivate mobile users to contribute their sources for others to borrow and an efficient mechanism to enable multi-site computation partition. More specifically, we formulate the problem as a Stackelberg game, and prove that there exists a unique Nash equilibrium for the game. Based on the unique Nash equilibrium, we propose an offloading protocol to derive the mobile users' strategies. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance and validate the theoretical properties of the proposed economy-based incentive mechanism.