Decentralized Computation Offloading Game for Mobile Cloud Computing

• Published in: IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems Vol. 26; no. 4; pp. 974 - 983
• Main Author: Chen, Xu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-04-2015; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Cloud computing; Computational modeling; Games; Mobile communication; Mobile handsets; Nash equilibrium; Wireless communication; Mobile cloud computing; decentralized computation offloading; game theory
• ISSN: 1045-9219; 1558-2183
• DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2014.2316834

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.