A Bayesian Game Formulation of Power Dissipation and Response Time Minimization in a Mobile Cloud Computing System

The rapidly developing cloud computing and virtualization techniques provide mobile devices with battery energy saving opportunities by allowing them to offload computation and execute applications remotely. A mobile device should judiciously determine whether to offload computation and which portion of application should be offloaded to the cloud. This paper considers a mobile cloud computing (MCC) interaction system consisting of multiple mobile devices and the cloud computing system. A Bayesian game formulation is proposed for the MCC interaction system. In this game, each mobile device determines the portion of its service requests for remote processing in the cloud computing system. All the mobile devices compete for the allocated resources in the data center. Each mobile device is aware of its own service request generating rate through effective prediction methods. It has only partial information about the other mobile devices. The objective of each mobile device is to minimize its power consumption as well as the service request response time. This paper proves that pure strategy BayesianNash equilibrium in this game always exists and is unique. The optimal strategy for all the mobile devices achieving the Bayesian-Nash equilibrium is derived using convex optimization technique. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Bayesian game-based optimization framework. The mobile devices can achieve simultaneous reduction in average power consumption and average service request response time, by 27.3% and 63.7%, respectively, compared with baseline methods. Keywords-mobile cloud computing; mobile devices; game theory; Bayesian game; resource allocation