Abstract: Mobile cloud computing (MCC) has become a promising technique to deal with computation- or data-intensive tasks. It overcomes the limited processing power, poor storage capacity, and short battery life of mobile devices. Providing continuous and on-demand services, MCC argues that the service must be available for users at anytime and anywhere. However, at present, the service availability of MCC is usually measured by some certain metrics of a real-world system, and the results do not have broad representation since different systems have different load levels, different deployments, and many other random factors. Meanwhile, for large-scale and complex types of services in MCC systems, simulation-based methods (such as Monte-Carlo simulation) may be costly and the traditional state-based methods always suffer from the problem of state-space explosion. In this paper, to overcome these shortcomings, fluid-flow approximation, a breakthrough to avoid state-space explosion, is adopted to analyze the service availability of MCC. Four critical metrics, including response time of service, minimum sensing time of devices, minimum number of nodes chosen, and action throughput, are defined to estimate the availability by solving a group of ordinary differential equations even before the MCC system is fully deployed. Experimental results show that our method costs less time in analyzing the service availability of MCC than the Markov- or simulation-based methods.

Key words: Service availability, Mobile cloud computing, Fluid-flow approximation, Ordinary differential equations

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