Energy-efficient task offloading for multiuser mobile cloud computing

Mobile cloud computing enables the resource-poor mobile terminals to deal with the resource-hungry applications thanks to the extra storage and computational resources at the cloud side. However, the advantages of mobile cloud computing cannot be fully exploited without proper collaboration of radio transmission and computing, which is challenging under multiuser scenarios due to the coupling of radio and computational resources. In this paper, targeting at reducing the terminal energy consumption, we study the joint optimization of radio and computational resources for multiple users in mobile cloud computing and propose a heuristic strategy, based on the latency constraint and the application type of each MT, for resource allocation of low computational complexity. Numerical results show that our proposed task offloading strategy can significantly reduce the total energy at the mobile terminal side by 40% with 3 mobile terminals in the system, compared with the non-offloading mobile computing scheme, while at the same time satisfying the delay constraints. Moreover, it performs fairly close to the optimum.