UNION: Fault-Tolerant Cooperative Computing in Opportunistic Mobile Edge Cloud

Opportunistic Mobile Edge Cloud in which opportunistically connected mobile devices run in a cooperative way to augment the capability of single device has become a timely and essential topic due to its widespread prospect under resource-constrained scenarios (e.g., disaster rescue). Because of the mobility of devices and the uncertainty of environments, it is inevitable that failures occur among the mobile nodes. Being different from existing studies that mainly focus on either data offloading or computing offloading among mobile devices in an ideal environment, we concentrate on how to guarantee the reliability of the task execution with the consideration of both data offloading and computing offloading under opportunistically connected mobile edge cloud. To this end, an optimization of mobile task offloading when considering reliability is formulated. Then, we propose a probabilistic model for task offloading and a reliability model for task execution, which estimates the probability of successful execution for a specific opportunistic path and describes the dynamic reliability of the task execution. Based on these models, a heuristic algorithm UNION (Fa u lt-Tolera n t Cooperat i ve C o mputi n g) is proposed to solve this NP-hard problem. Theoretical analysis shows that the complexity of UNION is \(\mathcal {O}(|\mathcal {I}|^2+|\mathcal {N}|) \) with guaranteeing the reliability of 0.99. Also, extensive experiments on real-world traces validate the superiority of the proposed algorithm UNION over existing typical strategies.