Toward Transcoding as a Service: Energy-Efficient Offloading Policy for Green Mobile Cloud

In this article we investigate energy-efficient offloading policy for transcoding as a service (TaaS) in a generic mobile cloud system. Computation on mobile devices can be offloaded to a mobile cloud system that consists of a dispatcher at the front end and a set of service engines at the back end. Particularly, a transcoding task can be executed on the mobile device (i.e. mobile execution) or offloaded and scheduled by the dispatcher to one of the service engines in the cloud (i.e. cloud execution). We aim to minimize the energy consumption of transcoding on the mobile device and service engines in the cloud while achieving low delay. For the mobile device, we formulate its offloading policy under delay deadline as a constrained optimization problem. We find an operational region on which execution mode, that is, mobile execution or cloud execution, is more energy efficient for the mobile device. For the cloud, we propose an online algorithm to dispatch transcoding tasks to service engines, with an objective to reduce energy consumption while achieving queue stability. By appropriately choosing the control variable, the proposed algorithm outperforms alternative algorithms, with lower time average energy consumption and time average queue length on the service engines. The proposed offloading policy can reduce energy consumption on both mobile devices and the cloud jointly, which provides guidelines for the design of green mobile cloud.