Empowering Mobile Service Provisioning through Cloud Assistance

The use of mobile devices as data service providers is on the rise. Mobile devices feature a large set of distinct characteristics that qualify them to be the most convenient computing platform for online services, both as consumers and providers. Mobile devices can take advantage of their mobility to provide location-based services and their association to a specific user to customize service offerings to fit personal preferences and current conditions. However, the increasing resource demands of mobile services and the inherent constraints of mobile devices limit the quality and type of functionality that can be offered, preventing mobile devices from exploiting their full potential as reliable data providers. Cloud computing offers mobile devices the opportunity to run resource-intensive tasks through computation offloading. The offloading decision is a tradeoff between data transfer and latency improvement to the benefit of alleviating the burden on mobile resource while improving the overall performance of service provisioning. This paper presents a framework for cloud-assisted mobile service provisioning, aimed at offering an augmented environment to resource-constrained mobile providers in order to deliver reliable services. The framework supports dynamic offloading based on the resource status at the mobile side and current network condition as well as user-defined energy constraints. It also enables the mobile provider to delegate the cloud to forward the service response directly to the user, given that no further processing is required by the provider. Performance evaluation shows up to 6x latency improvement for computational-intensive services that do not require large data transfer.