A General Framework for Crowdsourcing Mobile Communication, Computation, and Caching

Today's mobile devices are capable of tackling various complicated tasks that may require a large amount of communication, computation, and caching (3C) resources. Due to users' heterogeneous resources and service requirements, it is challenging for each user to always accomplish his task satisfactorily. To alleviate this issue, mobile users can exploit the heterogeneity and crowdsource their resources to enhance the task execution performance. In this paper, we propose a general 3C framework that enables mobile users to share all three types of resources through device- to-device connections. Such a framework generalizes many existing 1C/2C resource sharing models (that only shares one or two types of resources among users). To quantify the benefit of the proposed framework, we focus on an energy minimization problem, and show that the 3C framework always achieves a smaller total energy consumption, comparing with other 1C/2C models. Furthermore, we show that the energy reduction is maximized, when user connection probability and content caching ratio are neither too large nor too small. Our numerical results show that, when ignoring device-to-device transmission energy, the general 3C framework can reduce the total energy consumption by 82.98%, comparing with the 1C/2C models.