Cross-layer collaboration handoff mechanism based on multi-attribute decision in mobile computation offloading

In mobile cloud computing, employing computation offloading enables mobile devices to considerably augment their capability in emerging resource-hungry applications. However, studies on realistic offloading handoff mechanisms are still lacking. In the current work, a cross-layer collaboration handoff mechanism based on improved multi-attribute decision (CCHMD) is proposed to make reasonable, effective and efficient handoff decisions by considering the frequent movement of intelligent terminals and the heterogeneity of wireless networks. Cross-layer collaboration refers to the cooperation between communication handoff and computation handoff. The former mainly depends on received signal strength of mobile terminals, the minimum equality parameter and the minimum improvement parameter of all network attributes. By contrast, the latter hinges on several important attributes of candidate networks. To objectively evaluate the performance of each candidate network, we first apply the improved normalization and information entropy method (EM) to automatically calculate the weight value of each attribute, and employ the improved multi-attribute decision algorithm to assess all candidate networks. We then arrange these networks in descending order and select the first network as the optimal handoff network. Experimental results have proved that CCHMD exhibits better adaptability and performance than EM, simple additive weight and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution in terms of several indicators such as task execution time, handoff frequency, energy consumption and task execution efficiency.