Hierarchical evolutionary game based dynamic cloudlet selection and bandwidth allocation for mobile cloud computing environment

To bridge the gap between the resource-constrained mobile devices and the resource-demanding applications, mobile cloud computing (MCC) emerges for offloading complex tasks to a cloud server. Based on this concept, cloudlets, which move available resource to the vicinity of the mobile network, enhance further the system accessibility and performance. Moreover, to strengthen the network capacity in traffic intensive area, dense small cell network (DSCN) is proposed as one of the promising solutions. In this study, the operation of cloudlets and DSCN is collaboratively studied in order to further improve the system performance. On the one hand, users can select a cloudlet and dynamically adapt the connection according to the performance and the cost, which is referred to as a user-essential dynamic cloudlet selection problem. On the other hand, a cloudlet needs to set the optimal selling price and the size of resource for the users, which is considered as a cloudlet resource allocation problem. To jointly address the problems of dynamic cloudlet selection and resource allocation, the authors propose a hierarchical evolutionary game to maximise the utilities. Simulation studies are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms, which, indeed, improve the entire system performance significantly.