A cluster based computation offloading technique for mobile cloud computing in smart cities

The evolutionary trends of the Information Society have lead to the definition of the so-called Smart City, an environment characterized by the interaction of several heterogeneous technologies aiming at providing unprecedented services and efficiency. The Smart City is one of the most challenging scenarios for the Internet of Things (IoT) applicability. Among several things composing a Smart City, the computing infrastructures are responsible for giving a distributed elaboration intelligence to the environment. This paper takes into consideration the presence of the Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC), where different types of Cloud Computing Infrastructures (CCIs) are available through different wireless connections. MCC can be exploited by Smart Mobile Devices (SMDs) for offloading applications towards powerful remote servers and other SMDs pooled together, shortening execution time and extending battery life. Aim of this paper is to propose a cluster based computation offloading technique able to work in a distributed environment, in order to better satisfy the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of the SMD users, by minimizing a cost function taking into account a tradeoff between SMD's energy consumption and execution time.