A Unified Urban Mobile Cloud Computing Offloading Mechanism for Smart Cities

The increasing urbanization level of the world population has driven the development of a smart city geographic system, conceived as a fully connected wide area characterized by the presence of a multitude of smart devices, sensors, and processing nodes aimed at distributing intelligence into the city. At the same time, the pervasiveness of wireless technologies has led to the presence of heterogeneous networks, operating simultaneously in the same city area. One of the main challenges in this context is to provide sustainable solutions able to jointly optimize the data transfer, exploiting heterogeneous networks, and the data processing, exploiting heterogeneous devices, for managing smart city applications for citizens' communities. In this article, the UMCC framework is developed, introducing a mobile cloud computing model describing the flows of data and operations taking place in the smart city. In particular, we focus on the proposal of a unified offloading mechanism where communication and computing resources are jointly managed, allowing load balancing among the different entities in the environment, delegating both communication and computation tasks in order to satisfy the smart city application requirements. This allows us to cope with the limited battery power and computation capacity of smart mobile devices and plays a key role in a smart environment where wireless communication is of utmost relevance, particularly in the mobility and traffic control domains.