AGILE: A terminal energy efficient scheduling method in mobile cloud computing

With the development of mobile telecommunication technology, mobile phones have become a necessary tool in daily life and provided us many conveniences. Meanwhile, the huge number of cell phones constitute a potential high performance data processing system, called mobile cloud computing, to strengthen capacity for individual devices. Many researchers have studied about the architectures and scheduling algorithms of mobile cloud computing. However, little work has been performed about how to schedule mobile application tasks in data centers to extend battery life for mobile terminals. To address this issue, we investigate agent models, mobile energy consumption models and data transmission models under different connection environments. Based on which, we propose a novel terminal energy efficient scheduling method (AGILE for short). AGILE compares energy consumption in cloud execution and mobile execution according to the actual wireless environment, then makes energy-efficient decisions. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the AGILE under different wireless channels, and the performance impact on different parameters are studied. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method can save mobile devices’ energy effectively. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.