A user-satisfaction based offloading technique for smart city applications

The Smart cities applications are gaining an increasing interest among administrations, citizens and technologists for their suitability in managing the everyday life. One of the major challenges is regarding the possibility of managing in an efficient way the presence of multiple applications in a Wireless Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) environment, alongside the presence of a Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) infrastructure. In this context we propose a utility function model derived from the economic world aiming to measure the Quality of Service (QoS), in order to choose the best access point in a HetNet to offload part of an application on the MCC, aiming to save energy for the Smart Mobile Devices (SMDs) and to reduce computational time. We distinguish three different types of application, considering different offloading percentage of computation and analyzing how the cell association algorithm allows energy saving and shortens computation time. The results show that when the network is overloaded, the proposed utility function allows to respect the target values by achieving higher throughput values, and reducing the energy consumption and the computational time.