Online Auction for Truthful Stochastic Offloading in Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) leverages the advantages of both cloud computing and mobile computing. With trusted, resource-rich and Internet-connected computing units, referred to as cloudlets, MCC brings cloud resources closer to the mobile users (MU) at the network edge. While MCC has plenty of advantages, unique challenges exist for efficient operation in practical MCC systems. First, the system-wide utility depends on both the offloading policy at the MUs and the task admission policy at the cloudlets. When the computation tasks have heterogeneous deadlines, determining optimal policies at both the MUs and the cloudlets in a distributed manner is nontrivial. Additionally, truthful mechanisms are needed for MCC markets in order to achieve desirable trading behaviors between MUs and cloudlets. In this paper, we present a novel scheme, called Stochastic Offloading in Mobile cloud computing (SOM), to address the above challenges through an online auction approach. SOM achieves desirable economic properties, such as truthfulness, individual rationality and budget balance. Furthermore, by leveraging Lyapunov optimization techniques, the proposed SOM scheme can drive the long-term system-wide utility towards a near-optimum. Through rigorous theoretical analysis and comprehensive simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of SOM.