Coalition Formation Towards Energy-Efficient Collaborative Mobile Computing

With mobile offloading, computation-intensive tasks can be offloaded from mobile devices to the cloud to conserve energy. In principle, the idea is to trade the relatively low communication energy expense for high computation power consumption. In this paper, we propose that computation-intensive tasks can be distributed among nearby mobile devices, and focus on the case that a group of mobile users may collaborate with one another with one common target job. In particular, a user can reduce its own energy consumption by delegating a portion of the job to nearby users in a coalition. We propose distributed collaboration strategies based on game theory, and formulate the problem as a non-transferable utility coalition formation game in which users join or split from coalitions depending on the local preference. The stability of the resulting partition is studied. We show through simulation that the proposed algorithm reduces up to 22% of the average energy costs compared to the non-cooperative case, and the running time scales well as the number of users grows.