Fog and Fogonomics

11Noncooperative and Cooperative Computation Offloading

Xu Chen and Zhi Zhou

School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat‐sen University, Guangzhou, China

11.1 Introduction

As smart phones are gaining enormous popularity, more and more new mobile applications such as face recognition, natural language processing, interactive gaming, and augmented reality are emerging and attract great attention [1]. This kind of mobile applications are typically resource‐hungry, demanding intensive computation and high energy consumption. Due to the physical size constraint, however, mobile devices are in general resource‐constrained, having limited computation resources and limited battery life [1]. The tension between resource‐hungry applications and resource‐constrained mobile devices hence poses a significant challenge for the future mobile platform development.

As an interesting and promising solution to relieving such tension, task offloading has been emerged as a key focus in both academia and industry. In the last decade, many researchers focus on mobile cloud computing (see [2] and the references therein) where mobile users can offload their computation‐intensive tasks to the resource‐rich remote clouds via wireless access. Although this paradigm is already utilized as a form of commercial cloud services such as Windows Azure, it often suffers from labile wireless connections (e.g. weak cellular signal) and wide area network (WAN) delay between mobile devices and clouds [2]. As an ...