Decentralized and Optimal Resource Cooperation in Geo-Distributed Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile cloud computing is a key enabling technology in the era of the Internet of Things. Geo-distributed mobile cloud computing (GMCC) is a new scenario that adds geography consideration in mobile cloud computing. In GMCC, users are able to access cloud resources that are geographically close to their mobile devices. This is expected to reduce the communication delay and the service providers’ cost compared with the traditional centralized approach. In this paper, we focus on resource sharing through the cooperation among the service providers in geo-distributed mobile cloud computing. Then, we propose two different strategies for efficient resource cooperation in geographically distributed data centers. Furthermore, we present a coalition game theoretical approach to deal with the competition and the cooperation among the service providers. Utility functions have been specifically considered to incorporate the cost related to virtual machine migration and resource utilization. Illustrative results indicate that our proposed schemes are able to efficiently utilize limited resources with quality-of-service consideration.