An auction-based incentive mechanism for heterogeneous mobile clouds

Abstract

Traditional mobile cloud computing (MCC) adopts a onefold mobile device and public cloud paradigm. As the mobile device capabilities continue to develop, their opportunistic utilization in MCC has recently gained popularity. The new paradigm is a hybrid/heterogeneous mobile cloud (HMC) where mobile devices, cloudlets, and private/public cloud form a shared resource network for task offloading. However, mobile device users are discouraged from sharing their devices for running foreign tasks due to the battery life and privacy concerns. To incentivize mobile device users to utilize and participate in the HMC offloading service, we designed a task offloading market for the HMC service, where a mobile user can compete as a seller with others by bidding its redundant computing resources, and another mobile user as a buyer can pay the bidding price and offload the task to the winning user. To enable an incentive and fair competition of the mobile cloud offloading market, we propose a reverse auction-based incentive mechanism, mCloudAuc, to provide real-time auctions. The proposed auction algorithm demonstrates computation efficiency, truthfulness, and individual rationality for the participants through proof and multiple simulations. Our prototype implementation of mCloudAuc on Android platform has also shown its feasibility in practice.