Intelligent Network Management and Control

6Intelligent Computation Offloading in the Context of Mobile Cloud Computing

Zeinab MOVAHEDI

Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran

6.1. Introduction

Nowadays, due to the progress of mobile technologies in terms of both software and hardware, mobile devices, whose use is on the rise, are becoming an intrinsic part of our everyday life (Li et al. 2014). Given these advances, the role of mobile phones has evolved from a simple communication device to an essential tool for many other applications addressing our various daily needs. Examples of such applications include simulations, compression/decompression, image processing, virtual reality, video games, etc. Moreover, in response to the high expectations of mobile users, future mobile devices will use increasingly sophisticated applications. The development of these new applications is, nevertheless, restricted by mobile device limitations in terms of storage space, computation power and battery lifetime (Chen et al. 2015).

On the other hand, recent advances in telecommunication networks, in terms of data transmission throughput as well as number of users taken on, offer an opportunity for computation and greedy data offloading to cloud computing and storage center. This latter paradigm, known as mobile cloud computing (MCC), may give rise to a significant number of emerging applications, which are either not possible given the current performance of mobile devices, or are feasible, but require significant ...