NETWORKS & SECURITY
Adaptive Application Offloading Decision and
Transmission Scheduling for Mobile Cloud Computing
Junyi Wang 1,4, Jie Peng3, Yanheng Wei2, Didi Liu3, Jielin Fu*1
1
Guangxi Key Lab of Wireless Wideband Communication & Signal Processing, Guilin 541004, China
2
Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200000, China
3
School of Telecommunication Engineering Xian University, Xian 710049, China
4
Sci. and Tech. on Info. Transmission and Dissemination in Communication Networks Lab., Shijiazhuang 050000, China
*
The corresponding authoremail: fujielin@gmail.com
Abstract: Offloading application to cloud can
augment mobile devices computation capa-
bilities for the emerging resource-hungry mo-
bile application, however it can also consume
both much time and energy for mobile device
offloading application remotely to cloud. In
this paper, we develop a newly adaptive ap-
plication offloading decision-transmission
scheduling scheme which can solve above
problem efficiently. Specifically, we first pro-
pose an adaptive application offloading model
which allows multiple target clouds coexist-
ing. Second, based on Lyapunov optimization
theory, a low complexity adaptive offloading
decision-transmission scheduling scheme has
been proposed. And the performance analysis
is also given. Finally, simulation results show
thatcompared with that all applications
are executed locally, mobile device can save
68.557% average execution time and 67.095%
average energy consumption under situations.
Keywords: mobile cloud computing; applica-
tion offloading decision; transmission schedul-
ing scheme; Lyapunov optimization
I. INTRODUCTION
Received: Nov. 17, 2015
Revised: May 16, 2016 As smart mobile devices are gaining enormous
Editor: Yong Cui popularity, more and more new mobile appli-
169
cations, such as face recognition, large-scale
3D game and augmented reality, surge up and
attract great attentions [1, 2]. All these kinds
of mobile applications are typically user-inter-
active and resource-hungry, thus require quick
response and high energy consumption. In re-
cent years, advanced technologies in hardware
field have been developed, but general mobile
devices are still resource-constrained, having
limited computation resources and limited
battery lives due to their physical size con-
straint. The tension between resource-hungry
application and resource-constrained mobile
device hence poses a significant challenge for
the future mobile platform development [3].
With the rapid deployment of broadband
wireless networks, the newly emerging mobile
cloud computing [4] is envisioned as a prom-
ising solution to solve above tension. Mobile
cloud computing is introduced as an integra-
tion of cloud computing into the mobile envi-
ronment, in which mobile device can access to
clouds for resources by using wireless access
technology together with the Internet technol-
ogy [5]. In general mobile cloud computing,
there exists three parts: the end, the tube
and the cloud [6]. As illustrated in Figure 1,
vendors (such as Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (EC2), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
China Communications March 2017
(VPC), and PacHosting) provide computing
resource (such as servers, storage, software
and so on) for registered users. Thus, mobile
device can remotely offload their application
which cannot run or can generate much cost
on mobile device to appropriate cloud [7]. But
unlike cloud computing in wired network, the
mobile-specific challenges of mobile cloud
computing arise due to the unique character-
istics of mobile network, which have severe
resource constraints (such as the limitation
of bandwidth, communication latency) and
frequent variations [8]. When there are large
amount of data transferred in a wireless net-
work, the network delay may be increased
significantly and become intolerable. So an
adaptive application offloading decision and
wireless transmission scheduling have to be
made for mobile device to decide whether to
offload an application task or not and which
cloud to choose.
Now there have been many useful re-
search efforts dedicated to offloading data-
or computation-intensive programs from a
resource-poor mobile device to optimize ap-
plication execution cost (energy and response
time). For energy saving, [9] proposed a
Lyapunov optimization theory based dynamic
offloading algorithm to identify offloading
component without considering the impact
of changeable wireless channel on offload-
ing algorithm. [10] investigated a theoretical
framework and derived a threshold policy
for energy-optimal mobile cloud computing
under stochastic wireless channel. The in-
sufficient of their works was no performance
evaluation of real applications with intensive
computation. For response time saving, [11]
implemented and evaluated offloading mecha-
nisms for offloading computationally intensive
Java programs to remote servers by using Ibis
middleware. Their methods could not be ex-
tended to other execution environments since
their works were related with specific soft-
ware packet. To our best knowledge, only few
works focused on saving energy and response
time at the same time. Among them, [12] pro-
posed an offloading framework which consid-
China Communications March 2017
ered response time and energy consumption
simultaneously and made numerical results In this paper, the au-
analysis. However, the theoretical analysis thors have designed
about their offloading model was not given. and implemented an
adaptive application
In this paper, based on all these researches we
offloading policy for
develop a good applicability offloading model multiple offloading
which optimizes these two key performance target clouds.
indexes at the same time. Based on Lyapun-
ov optimization, the offloading problem was
solved and performance analysis was made.
Specifically, aiming at the stochastic input
mobile application workloads which mainly
depend on users needs, we develop a custom-
izable cost model which allows mobile user to
adjust the weight of application response time
and energy consumption based on battery life-
time, wireless transmission channel, mobile
CPU speed, clouds resources and so on. Ap-
plication execution targets including multiple
different clouds can provide different avail-
able cloud resource for mobile device on any
slot t, which improve the execution efficiency
of real-time application. In the mobile cloud
computing, mobile device can access to dif-
ferent clouds through different wireless access
networks, such as 3/4/5G, Wi-Fi and so on.
In conclusion, based on the customizable cost
model, we propose an adaptive offloading pol-
icy (including offloading decision and trans-
mission scheduling) to determine whether to
The Cloud
Cloud servers with
virtua machine(VM)
Ac ce s s t o t he
c l oud t hr ough
Intnet
I nt e r net
Cloud
Computing
Mobile
The Tube Wireless Access
Computing
Point
3G /4G /5G /Wi -Fi
The End Smart Mobile
Device
Fig. 1 A basic framework of the mobile cloud computing
170
 offload application remotely and which cloud
to choose for decreasing application execution
cost. The main results and contributions of this
paper are summarized as follows:
l G
eneral offloading model formulation:
We formulate an offloading model which
considers stochastic applications (i.e., the
input computation data size of application
is stochastic, so is the computation size) un-
der general network environment, by taking
into account both response time and energy
consumption of application. Our offloading
model has good universality and scalability.
l A
daptive offloading decision and trans-
mission scheduling scheme: Based on
Lyapunov optimization theory, we obtain
an optimal offloading policy with low com-
plexity. The performance analysis is also
given.
l pplication offloading reference: We de-
A er energy consumption by lowering the power
vise several simulation experiments based
on real network settings. The simulation
results show that compared with that all
applications are executed on local mobile
device, mobile device can save 68.557%
average response time and 67.095% av-
erage energy consumption. Moreover, the
statistics results of application offloading
probability can provide a reference for real
application offloading on mobile device. It
can reduce the overhead of offloading poli-
cy itself.
The rest of this paper is organized as fol-
lows. Section II describes some related works.
Section III gives the problem statement and
model formulation. Section IV details the im-
plementation of dynamic offloading. Section
V shows the performance analysis of applica-
tion offloading policy. Section VI shows the
simulation results and numerical analysis. And
Section VII concludes this paper.
II. RELATED WORKS
Many research works have investigated off-
loading data- or computation-intensive pro-
grams from resource-poor mobile device. All
the researches aimed at different important
171
factors (such as bandwidth, routing and so
on) and different objects (such as energy con-
sumption, response time and so on). Accord-
ing to their research goals, these works almost
can be classified into three categories.
1) Works on energy saving: Extending
battery lifetime is one of the most crucial de-
sign objectives of mobile device because of
their limited battery capacity. [13] proposed a
taxonomy study for energy-aware high perfor-
mance computing, they built energy model to
approximate the energy consumption of off-
loading. [14] studied the feasibility of mobile
computation offloading. They gave a feasibili-
ty evaluation method and to evaluate the costs
of both off-clones and back-clones in terms
of bandwidth and energy consumption. [15]
made an encoding scheme for mobile cloud
computing network, which could achieve low-
consumption of a CPU and a wireless network
interface card. [16][17] aimed at studying
novel routing methods for transmitting data
effectively to optimize nodes energy. All
above researches aimed at maximizing battery
lifetime for mobile devices.
2) Works on response time saving: Re-
sponsiveness of application is important,
especially for real-time and user-interactive
applications. [18] developed an offloading
middleware, which provided runtime offload-
ing service to improve the responsiveness
of mobile device. [19] studied an exhaustive
search algorithm to examine all possible ap-
plication partitions in order to find an optimal
offloading partition. All partition methods per-
formance well for small-size applications. [20]
proposed an effective virtual machine place-
ment algorithm to reduce cloud service re-
sponse time under wireless mesh environment.
[21] studied multi-user computation partition-
ing problem, which considered partitioning
of multiple users computations together with
the scheduling of offloaded computations on
cloud resources. [22]-[24] aimed at studying
transmission mechanism or protocol to solving
applications transferring problems for the re-
al-time application. Under mobile cloud com-
China Communications March 2017
puting, fast and effective data transmission is
important. All of these can achieve minimum
average application completion time for mo-
bile device.
3) Works on energy and time saving:
Energy consumption and response time are
two key performance indexes of mobile ap-
plication. However, only few works have ad-
dressed these two targets simultaneously. [25]
implemented a framework named ThinkAir,
which could make developers simply migrate
their application workloads to the cloud. [26]
proposed a game theoretic approach to achieve
efficient computation offloading for optimiz-
ing execution costs.
All these works studied energy consump-
tion and response time for mobile cloud com-
puting in different ways, they provided many
important references for our works. Based on
all these works, we provide our own adaptive
application offloading model from other as-
pects.
III. MODEL FORMULATION
In this paper, we investigate an adaptive ap-
plication offloading policy under mobile com-
puting cloud where mobile device can offload
compute-intensive applications to one of the
multiple available clouds through various
available wireless networks. The key charac-
teristics of offloading model are described as
follows, and the offloading model is also for-
mulated as follows.
consumption simultaneously, the controller on
mobile device needs to determine whether or
not to offload application to cloud based on
the current network, application itself, avail-
able cloud resource and so on. Let
be the set of clouds. If there is more than one
available cloud on slot t, the controller needs
to further choose the best one among all avail-
able clouds. Application with few input com-
putation data size (i.e., the program codes and
data) and high computation size (i.e., the total
number of CPU cycles) suits the offloading
model better. Application component parti-
tioning is not considered.
3.2 Offloading model
For the convenience of presentation, some pa-
rameters are listed in Table I.
3.2.1 Application generation and ooading
decision
Application request for mobile device is
stochastic, which mainly depends on the
demand of mobile user. Vector
is used to describe application characteristics
on slot t. Different applications have different
characteristics. For any slot t, and
are both non-negative integers and satisfy
, respective-
ly. and are both finite maximums.

3.1 Network description

Network scenario is illustrated in Figure 2,
which contains one mobile device and multi-
ple target clouds. To simplify the offloading
model, we slot the system model with fixed
size slots . We assume that 3/4/5G
network is available for all locations while
the availability of Wi-Fi network depends on
locations. The data transmission rate of each
wireless network changes over different slots.
When there is a request for application exe-
cution on mobile device on slot t, in order to
improve user experiment and reduce energy Fig. 2 Network operation topology for application offloading

China Communications March 2017 172

Table I Notation table of data that can be transmitted by wireless
Factor Unit Definition link to cloud n on slot t, which is determined
The input computation data size of application (i.e., program by . is assumed to restrict all trans-
D(t) bit
and data) missions to non-negative and bounded rate, so
The computation size (i.e., the number of CPU processing cy- exists for all and all t.
S(t) MHz
cles)
Additional structure of can be imposed to
Mobile devices CPU speed (i.e., CPU running cycles per sec-
cpu MHz model the physical transmission capabilities of
ond)
wireless access network.
Pidle Watt Idle power of mobile device
Thus, the dynamic of input queue is
Pactive Watt Running power of mobile device
defined as:
Ptrans Watt Transmitting power of mobile device
Computation capability (i.e., CPU running cycles per second)
n (t) MHz  (1)
provided by cloud n on slot t
cld

which assumes that newly arriving data

n MHz The max computation capability of cloud n
cannot be transmitted on slot t.
cld(max)

We assume that vectors are inde- 3.3 Problem formulation

pendent and identically distributed (i. i. d.)
over slots and may have a joint probability
distribution that is arbitrary. This distribution
is not necessarily known. As for an appli-
cation request, let be
execution indicator variable on slot t, which
determines whether or not to offload ap-
plication to the cloud n. If exists,
application is offloaded remotely to cloud n.
On the other hand, If exists, the ap-
plication is executed on local mobile device.
Let represents the
decision vector of mobile device on slot t.
According to the assumption that an applica-
tion which needs to be offloaded can only be
offloaded to one cloud during one application
request, must satisfy.
3.2.2 Wireless transmission link
If the controller of mobile device decides
to offload application to cloud n on slot t, it
could put all input computation data of the
application into input queue at network
layer. Then mobile device transmits all the
computation input data to cloud through wire-
less access network and Internet as shown in
Figure 2. Let be the vector of traffic load
and state of currently available wireless access
network on slot t. is assumed to be i. i. d.
over slots and may have a probability distribu-
tion that is arbitrary. Define
as transmission vector, as the amount
On slot t, mobile device firstly needs to esti-
mate application executing cost (including re-
sponse time and execution energy). According
to application offloading decision, the execut-
ing time is given by:
(2)
where is the estimated
transmission time for offloading application
to cloud n on slot t, is the
estimated execution time for cloud n running
application, and is the
estimated execution time for local mobile
device executing application. The first part
on the right-hand-side of (2) is the offloading
response time (including transmission time
and running time), and the second part is the
response time executing locally. Specifically,
according to the assumption that one applica-
tion which needs to be offloaded can only be
offloaded to one cloud, so based on the value
of vector , the response time is denoted by
either the first part of (2) if offloading, or the
second part of (2) if executing locally. Here
we neglect the propagation delay of input
codes and data. And we also do not consider
the time spent for the result data transmitted
from cloud to the mobile device, because the
size of data returning from cloud is always

173 China Communications March 2017

insignificant compared with the amount of raw Based on the problem description and mod-
input data and code of application. eling above, the objective is to solve:
Based on (2), the energy consumption
is given as follows: (7)

(3) where we use the following stability definition

[27]:
where is the Definition 1. Queue is
estimated transmission energy for off- strongly stable if
loading application to cloud n on slot t,
is the estimated ex- Intuitively, this means that a queue is
ecution energy when running on cloud n, and strongly stable if its average backlog is finite.
is the estimated
execution energy when executing on local mo- IV. DYNAMIC APPLICATION
bile device. OFFLOADING POLICY
Due to the different units of response time
and energy consumption, a naive cost function The above problem (7) can be cast as a sto-
that sums up response time and energy con- chastic network optimization. Early works
sumption is not appropriate to our problem. [9] used Lyapunov optimization theory to
In this paper, we normalize and as show that the queuing naturally fits in the
follows: related application offloading problem. Rath-
er than trying to solve problem (7) (which
(4) require a-priori knowledge of the application
, queue backlogs and so on),
(5)
we use Lyapunov optimization theory to solve
and are the normalization represen- (7) that only requires knowledge of the current
tations of response time and energy consump- network state and queues backlogs [28]. It can
tion respectively. reduce the complexity of solving the offload-
Then, based on (4) and (5), we give a com- ing problem [9].
posite cost function:
(6) 4.1 Lyapunov optimization
where is a user-specified variable in the Let represent a concatenated
range of [0, 1], which is used for differen- vector of all queues. The quadratic Lyapunov
tiating the importance of response time and function is:
energy consumption of application. If =0,
(8)
it implies that the energy consumption is the
only criterion in determining the offloading Define as Lyapunov drift,
decision and offloading target cloud. On the then use (1) to calculate the upper bound of
other hand, if =1 the response time is the Lyapunov drift function:
only criterion. is upper bounded by the
constant :
(9)
Define as the time-averaged expected ex-
ecution cost:
where in the final inequality we have used
the fact that for any , we

China Communications March 2017 174

 have:
And the constant B in (9) is calculated as
follows:
Based on Lyapunov theory, in order to min-
imize in (7), the drift-plus-penalty function
is consider. From (9),
the drift-plus-penalty expression satisfies:
(10)
in (10), is a constant that determines
a tradeoff between queue size and execution
cost.
Then based on the expression of and
(10), we have:
(11)
Every slot t, our adaptive offloading policy
is design to observe , , and
, then make application offloading
decision and transmission scheduling to min-
imize the right-hand-side of the expression
(11). That is, application offloading decision
and transmission scheduling are made to
solve the following problem:
(12)
175
Where we omit the constant on slot t which
have nothing to do with the decision variable
an(t), such as B, V and .
4.2 Offloading decision
Due to the fact that all target clouds are inde-
pendent, we can further simplify (12) by ex-
ploiting the separable structure as follows: Ev-
ery slot t, if any application occurs,
the application offloading policy observes
, , and for each . Based
on all these observed values, the application
offloading policy makes offloading decision
for every cloud:
(13)
For convenience of description, here we
define as:
Based on the observed values, (13) can be
solved. We can choose :
(14)
Now we obtain all suitable target clouds,
i.e. a(t). But do not al-
ways hold here. So the mobile device needs to
choose the best one among all fit target clouds.
4.3 Transmission scheduling
After making offloading decision, vector
should be obtained. In other words, we obtain
all possible target clouds. If , it
means that mobile device has more than one
appropriate target cloud to offload on slot t.
Based on and , we make further dis-
cussion to choose the best one:
China Communications March 2017
(15) (17)
Then we choose the best cloud which sat- Proof. The proof of Theorem 1 follows
isfies . Otherwise, if , [28].
Based on -only policy in [28], for any
it means the application is executed locally on
there exist a stationary, randomized off-
slot t. If , it means that mobile loading policy that chooses feasible controlled
device cloud offload application to the only variable to yield the following steady
correct cloud n which satisfies on state values:
slot t. (18)
In conclusion, based on Lyapunov theory, (19)
there is no need to obtain the future/history The value of is based on . (19)
network state values which may bring delay can ensure system stable for feasible solutions
and energy consumption. And the solving existing.
complexity just depends on the structure of the Substitute an offloading policy into (10)
decision spaces (the set of all possible deci- and take expectations gives:
sion variables). The offloading decision set in
our paper contains a finite number of possible
control actions, so offloading policy can sim-
ply evaluates the problem over each decision
option and chooses the best one. The Lyapun-
(20)
ov technique has low complexity for this kind
here we used the fact that and are
of problem.
independent under the offloading policy. Then
using (18)-(19) into the right-hand-side of (20)
V. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS
gives:
Based on Lyapunov optimization theory, the
following theorem details the performance
analysis of the adaptive application offloading
This inequality is valid for any .
policy.
Therefore:
Theorem 1 (Performance of Offloading
Policy) Assume queues are initially empty, so
Summing from t=0 to T-1:
that for all n. For any control pa-
rameter , the solution derived by our dy-
namic offloading policy stabilizes the system
and has the following inequalities: Using , and dividing by
1) Time average expected cost satisfies: gives:
(21)
(16)
which proves (16) by taking a limit supremum
Where is the optimal solution of problem as .
(7) over all control policies that satisfy all re- We additionally assume all constraints of
quired constraints. Constant B is derived from the network can be achieved based on slack-
(9). ness [28], which implies the feasibility of the
2) Supposing there are and offloading model. In other words, there are
for which the Slater condition values and ( ) and an
holds [28], stated below in (22)-(23). Then: offloading policy choosing decision variable
that satisfies:
(22)

China Communications March 2017 176

 (23)
(23) shows that there exists a policy which
makes average transmission rate higher than
average arrival rate for every queue in net-
work. It ensures network stability.
Using (22)-(23) into right-hand-side of (20)
gives:
Thus:
Summing from t=0 to T-1:
Using , , dividing by
and rearranging terms above gives:
(24)
However, because our algorithm satisfies
all of the desired constraints of the optimi-
zation problem (7), its limiting time average
expectation for cannot be better than :
(25)
Taking a limit supremum of (24) as
and using (25) yields:
(26)
which proves (17).
In conclusion, Theorem 1 characterizes the
performance of our dynamic offloading: For
any parameter , the time average expect-
ed penalty (i.e., execution cost) satisfies (16)
and hence is either less than the target value
, or differs from by no more than a
fudge factor , which can be made arbi-
trarily small as increased. (17) indicates that
all queues are strongly stability. However, the
time average queue backlog bound increases
linearly in the parameter. Thus, this presents
a cost-backlog tradeoff of . On
177
the other hand, it also can be seen that our
offloading policy can maintain the stability
of queues while driving the time average cost
to its exact optimum value. All of these con-
firmed the effectiveness of our application
offloading policy. In the next section, we will
further verify our offloading policy by real
simulation.
VI. SIMULATION RESULTS
In this section, we conducted several experi-
ments on OMNeT++ to evaluate our offload-
ing policy. Simulation settings are as follows:
There are one mobile device and two remote
clouds in wireless network scenario, which
is similar to Figure 2. The mobile device is
equipped with one 1-GHz processor and Wi-Fi
IEEE 802.11 b/g interface (Taking HTC Nex-
us One as an example). Its idle power, running
power, and transmitting power is 0.886W,
1.539W, 2.262W respectively. The cloud is
simulated by a resource pool [12]. Cloud 0
contains 1000 concurrent servers in which
every server is with a 3.9-GHz Intel proces-
sor, cloud 1 contains 10 concurrent servers in
which every server is with a 1.8-GHz Inter
processor. As for wireless access network, 3G
and Wi-Fi networks are available in the whole
network. To distinguish wireless 3G and Wi-
Fi, mobile device offloads application to cloud
0 just through wireless 3G network, and to
cloud 1 through Wi-Fi network. The orders
of magnitude of transmission rate for 3G and
Wi-Fi are 10Kb/s and 103Kb/s, respectively
[9]. And the real-time application generated
by mobile device is considered as a random
process. Their input computation data size
and computation size are 102KB and 10GHz
in terms of order of magnitude, respectively.
The control weights are V=0.98 and =0.55.
However, we adopt these settings just for ex-
position purpose. The analysis in the previous
section does not depend on these settings.
6.1 Performance evaluation of
adaptive offloading policy
To gain insight on our offloading policy,
China Communications March 2017
we compare our offloading policy with one cost. All of these further implied the effective-
scheme that all applications are executed on ness of our offloading decision algorithm and
local mobile device (i.e., no offloading and no transmission scheduling scheme.
scheduling for all application). For the con-
6.2 Offloading reference for various
venience of description, L scheme is used to
kinds of application
represent the scheme that all applications are
executed on local mobile device. Above simulation numerical results demon-
We first show the mobile devices execution strate that our offloading policy is effective
cost comparison between offloading policy for the kind of application whose average off-
and L scheme. Figure 3(a) and Figure 3(b) loading probability is 85.54% (It comes from
respectively show the comparison of time-av-
eraged energy consumption and response time
between offloading policy and L scheme. It
demonstrates that the offloading policy can
help to save about 68.557% average response
time and 67.095% average energy, which
proves that the offloading policy is effective.
On the other hand, we also use Figure
(a) Execution energy
4(a) and Figure 4(b) to respectively compare
time accumulative energy consumption and
response time between offloading policy and
L scheme. It clearly shows that our offload-
ing policy can extend the battery lifetime of
mobile device and improve mobile user ex-
perience at the same time. Conclusively, our
(b) Response time
application offloading is indeed helpful for the
mobile device which has limited resources to
Fig. 3 Comparison of time-average execution cost between our offloading and L
run the sophisticated and real-time application.
scheme
We next show the impact of offloading pol-
icy on queues backlogs under above wireless
network scenario. On every slot t, the input
computation data of application which needs
to be uploaded to cloud 0 caches in queue 0.
Similarly, the input computation data of ap-
plication which needs to be uploaded to cloud
1 caches in queue 1. Figure 5(a) and Figure
5(b) reveal the dynamics of queue backlogs
in queue 0 and queue 1, respectively. Both (a) Execution energy

queues lengths are finite for any slot, which

indicates that queues are stable (i.e., network
stability). Meanwhile, simulation statistics
show that the total amount of application
offloaded to cloud 0 is 26 and to cloud 1 is
814, which means most applications are sent
through Wi-Fi network. It indicates that the (b) Response time

input computation data migration cost among

mobile device and clouds caused by wireless Fig. 4 Comparison of time-accumulated execution cost between our offloading
communication dominate the whole execution and L scheme

China Communications March 2017 178

 creases with the computation size. This is be-
cause as the computation size increases, mo-
bile device would rather choose to utilize the
cloud computing via computation offloading
to mitigate the heavy cost of local computing.
(2) Fix the computation size of application,
the offloading probability decreases with the
(a) Backlogs of queue 0 increasing size of the input computation data
due to the fact that a larger data size requires
higher overhead for computation offloading
via wireless communication. (3) The ratio of
the computation size to the input computation
data size is no less than 104 (the offloading
probability is 54.03%), the proposed offload-
ing policy works well because low offloading
(b) Backlogs of queue 1
probability indicates poor offloading policy
according to previous model theory analysis.
Fig. 5 Queue backlogs on every slot t under our offloading policy
In fact, all these statistical results can do
help for offloading software implementation
Table II Offloading probability for all kinds applications under our network envi- for mobile device and can reduce offloading
ronment
itself running overhead at the same time: when
Application (including OP(%)
the programmers design offloading program,
OMDS and OMCS) 101KB 102KB 103KB 104KB
they can put all statistics collected under all
10 MHz
0
0.86 0 0 0 different network environment similar to Ta-
101MHz 6.75 0.86 0 0 ble II into the program. In this way, when a
10 MHz
2
54.03 6.75 0.86 0 mobile device needs to deal with the real-time
10 MHz
3
85.54 54.03 6.75 0.86 application, Table statistics can provide a ref-
104MHz 97.62 85.54 54.03 6.75 erence factor for application offloading, reduc-
10 MHz
5
99.06 97.62 85.54 54.03 ing the overhead of the application offloading
106MHz 99.38 99.06 97.62 85.54 itself running.
10 MHz
7
99.38 99.38 99.06 97.62
108MHz 99.38 99.38 99.38 99.06
VII. CONCLUSIONS

Saving energy and quick response in mo-

above simulation). To investigate the impact
of general application on adaptive offloading
policy, we next implement the simulations for
different applications. The simulation results
are summarized in Table II. For the conve-
nience of exposition, some abbreviations are
used in Table II: OMDS represents the Order
of Magnitudes of Data Size; OP represents the
Offloading Probability of application; OMCS
represents the Order of Magnitudes of Com-
putation Size.
From Table II, we can get three conclu-
sions: (1) Fix the input computation data size
of application, the offloading probability in-
bile computing are becoming increasingly
important due to the challenge of running
computationally intensive applications on
resource-constrained mobile devices. In this
paper, we have designed and implemented an
adaptive application offloading policy. Un-
like previous works, which consider only one
target cloud, our offloading policy is suitable
for multiple offloading target clouds. And the
numerical results show that mobile device can
save about 68.557% average response time
and 67.095% average energy consumption.
Our future work includes three aspects.
First, we will implement an offloading policy

179 China Communications March 2017

among multiple mobile devices and target
clouds in mobile cloud computing. Second, we
plan to investigate the applications partitions
scheme for some special applications. Finally,
we will study the overhead caused by offload-
ing policy itself.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank the re-
viewers for their detailed reviews and con-
structive comments, which have helped to
improve the quality of this paper. This work
was supported by National Natural Science
Foundation of China (Grant No. 61261017,
No. 61571143 and No. 61561014); Guangxi
Natural Science Foundation (2013GXNS-
FAA019334 and 2014GXNSFAA118387);
Key Laboratory of Cognitive Radio and In-
formation Processing, Ministry of Education
(No. CRKL150112); Guangxi Key Lab of
Wireless Wideband Communication & Signal
Processing (GXKL0614202, GXKL0614101
and GXKL061501); Sci. and Tech. on Info.
Transmission and Dissemination in Commu-
nication Networks Lab (No. ITD-U14008/
KX142600015); and Graduate Student Re-
search Innovation Project of Guilin University
of Electronic Technology (YJCXS201523).
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Biographies
Junyi Wang, received his M.S.
degree in fundamental mathe-
matics from Xiangtan Universi-
ty, and the Ph.D. degree in sig-
nal and information processing
from Beijing University of Posts
and Telecommunications, Bei-
jing, China, in 2003 and 2008
respectively. He is currently an associate professor
with the Academy of Information and Communica-
tion, Guilin University of electronic Technology. His
current research interests include stochastic network
optimization and network coding. Email: wangjy@
guet.edu.cn.
181
Jie Peng, is currently pursu-
ing the Ph.D. degree with the
School of Telecommunication
Engineering, Xidian University,
Xian. Her research interests
include mobile and wireless
network, resource allocation
i n m o b i l e c l o u d c o m p u t-
ing and stochastic network optimization. Email:
pjie86668@163.com.
Yanheng Wei, received his
M.S. degree in electronics and
communication engineering
from Guilin University of elec-
tronic Technology in 2014. His
research interests include sto-
chastic network optimization
and network coding.
Didi Liu, is an associate pro-
fessor with the College of Elec-
tronic Engineering, Guangxi
N o r m a l U n i v e r s i t y. S h e i s
currently pursuing the Ph.D.
degree with the School of Tele-
communication Engineering,
Xidian University, Xian. Her
research interests include stochastic network optimi-
zation and signal processing.
Jielin Fu, received the B.S.
degree in communication en-
gineering from Beijing jiaotong
University, Beijing, China, in
1996. And he received his M.S.
degree in communication engi-
neering from Guilin University
of electronic Technology, Guilin,
China, in 2001. He is currently an associate professor
with the Academy of Information and Communica-
tion, Guilin University of electronic Technology. His
research interests focus on wireless and broadband
communication network. Email: fujielin@gmail.com.
China Communications March 2017