Delay optimization for mobile cloud computing application offloading in smart cities

Abstract

In smart cites, more and more smart mobile devices (SMDs) have many computation-intensive applications to be processed. Mobile cloud computing (MCC) as an effective technology can help SMDs reduce their energy consumption and processing delay by offloading the tasks on the distributed cloudlet. However, due to long transmission delay resulting from the unstable wireless environment, the SMD may be out of the serving area before the cloudlet transmits responses to the user. Thus, delay is a crucial problem for the MCC offloading. In this paper, we consider a multi-SMDs MCC system, where each SMD having an application to be offloaded asks for computation offloading to a cloudlet. In order to minimize the total delay of the SMDs in the system, we jointly take the offloading cloudlet selection, wireless access selection, and computation resource allocation into consideration. We formulate the total delay minimization problem as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem which is NP-hard. We propose an improved genetic algorithm to obtain a local optimal result. Simulation results demonstrated that our proposal could effectively reduce the system delay.