Remote Cloud vs Local Mobile Cloud: A Quantitative Analysis

The smartphones have evolved a lot during recent years. However, they are still limited in their battery time, computational power and storage space. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) has emerged as a promising solution that aims to augment smartphone's capabilities by providing a vast pool of computational power and storage space at cloud data center. In parallel to this, cooperation based computing is a recent concept in MCC that augments smartphone's capabilities by accumulating the computational resources of nearby devices to run a task. In this paper, we discuss different scenarios of computational offloading for a User Equipment (UE) and find an optimal option in terms of its energy consumption and task completion time. In particular, we compare the energy consumption and task completion time of a mobile application for local processing, offloading to a remote cloud and exploiting the cooperation based computing in the local Mobile Cloud (MC).We mark an offloading threshold for different offloading scenarios, so a UE can decide among offloading to a local MC or to a remote cloud, depending upon the size of the task it is offloading.