Community clinic: Economizing mobile cloud service cost via cloudlet group

The explosive growth of mobile applications causes the mobile traffic to easily exceed the capacity of the cloud service due to the bandwidth limits of last mile connections to the cloud and legacy backhauls to macrocells' base stations. It degrades mobile applications' quality of service since the mobile devices have to spend more time and thus consume more battery power for data transmissions. It also enforces the cloud provider to put a huge investment to update its infrastructure and the induced cost is inevitably borne by all mobile users. To resolve this issue, in this paper we propose a so-called community clinic solution, which embeds the cloudlet group between the cloud and mobile users, to cut down the cost introduced by the massive deployment of the cloud's data centers and save the battery power consumed by the mobile devices. We firstly show that the mobile devices can consume less energy by choosing the service provided by the cloudlet group. We then model the system with and without the cloudlet group as two types of supply chain and prove that the cloudlet group can increase the cloud's profit without putting additional cost on mobile users. We also propose the real-time group-buying auction for the cloudlet group to promote its service to its nearby mobile users with a lower price and maximize its profit. The community clinic can result in a win-win-win outcome among the cloud, cloudlet group and mobile users. Numerical experiments are further conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme.