Toward vehicle-assisted cloud computing for smartphones

Mobile cloud computing is an emerging technology for facilitating complex application execution on smartphones. Cloud services are utilized not only to speed up the running of mobile applications but to save energy for smartphones as well. In this paper, we propose to combine the vehicular cloud with the infrastructure-based cloud to expand the current available resources for task requests from smartphones. In our proposed architecture, the vehicular cloud acts as a cloud service provider for smartphones. Moreover, we propose a flexible offloading strategy (FOS) to carry out task migration. The vehicular cloud is able to discover and utilize the underutilized resources in vehicles to accomplish application offloading for smartphones. The FOS estimates the efficiency of various cloud service providers based on current resource conditions and then selects the suitable cloud service provider to perform the requested task. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can improve the performance of mobile applications on smartphones in terms of task response time and energy consumption.