Collaborative Mobile Clouds: An Energy Efficient Paradigm for Content Sharing

On the way toward enabling efficient content distribution, reducing energy consumption and prolonging battery life of mobile equipment, an emerging paradigm, i.e., mobile cloud, which is based on content distribution, was proposed. As a mobile platform that is oriented toward content distribution, mobile cloud is also foreseen as an energy-efficient solution for future wireless networks. The benefits of using CMC for content distribution or distributed computing from social networking perspectives have been studied earlier. In this article, we first present the concepts of CMC and then discuss the energy-efficiency benefits from the system-level point-of-view as well as open challenges in designing a green CMC. Moreover, we investigate the problem of forming mobile clouds for the purpose of content distribution and energy-efficiency. Specifically, given a group of users interested in downloading the same content from an operator, an energy-aware based user selection and scheduling algorithm is proposed. Simulation examples show that a significant energy-saving performance can be achieved without depleting the battery of any user equipment by the proposed scheme. Also, the research potential is discussed in the context of CMC.