Heuristics to allocate high-performance cloudlets for computation offloading in mobile ad hoc clouds

Cyber foraging is an important method to enable resource-constrained mobile devices to perform applications in different mobile cloud computing environments to improve performance and to save energy consumption. This paper focuses on the decision problem about how to offload computation-intensive applications in mobile ad hoc network-based cloud computing environments. A set of online and batch scheduling heuristics were proposed to offload dynamically arriving independent tasks among mobile nodes. The heuristics were validated in a simulation environment, and their performances with respect to both user-centric and system-centric metrics such as the average makespan, the average waiting time, the average slowdown and the average utilization, were investigated with comprehensive experiments. Experimental results show that it is not appropriate to map tasks only based on the expected bandwidth, execution time or the overall offloading time, On the contrary, the expected completion time must be taken into account. Furthermore, the MCTComm heuristic seems to be the best choice from the standpoint of the tradeoff between the complexity and the performance.