Reliability Analysis for Multipath Communications in Mobile Cloud Computing Architectures

Abstract

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) has gained much attention from both academia and industry in recent years. It can support new types of services, such as m-commerce, m-learning, and mobile healthcare, and enrich mobile users' experience and satisfaction by taking full advantage of cloud computing. In MCC architectures multipath communications can be achieved with multihomed mobile devices, so as to utilize multiple paths for data transmission in parallel. They can achieve better utilization of bandwidth resource, split traffic for load balancing, and enhance reliability, fault tolerance, and robustness for applications. However, little attention has been paid to model the reliability of multipath communications in case of path failure. In this paper we investigate the reliability of concurrent multipath communications in MCC architectures and propose two reliability models when paths are failure. One is for static path failure where the failed paths cannot recover for communication in some delay time. The other is for dynamic path failure where the failed paths can recover in some delay time. Finally, numerical results are given to illustrate the reliability of multipath communications.