Decentralized Computation Offloading Game for Mobile Cloud Computing

TLDR

Mobile cloud computing is envisioned as a promising approach to augment computation capabilities of mobile devices for emerging resource-hungry mobile applications. The paper proposes a game‑theoretic approach to achieve efficient computation offloading in mobile cloud computing. The authors formulate the offloading decision as a decentralized game, design a mechanism that reaches a Nash equilibrium, and evaluate its efficiency ratio relative to the centralized optimum. The game always admits a Nash equilibrium, and numerical results show the mechanism achieves efficient offloading and scales well with system size.

Abstract

Mobile cloud computing is envisioned as a promising approach to augment computation capabilities of mobile devices for emerging resource-hungry mobile applications. In this paper, we propose a game theoretic approach for achieving efficient computation offloading for mobile cloud computing. We formulate the decentralized computation offloading decision making problem among mobile device users as a decentralized computation offloading game. We analyze the structural property of the game and show that the game always admits a Nash equilibrium. We then design a decentralized computation offloading mechanism that can achieve a Nash equilibrium of the game and quantify its efficiency ratio over the centralized optimal solution. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism can achieve efficient computation offloading performance and scale well as the system size increases.