A QoE-Aware Strategy for Supporting Service Continuity in an MCC Environment

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) enables ubiquitous access to a diverse range of Internet multimedia services in a pay-as-you-go economic model. In an MCC environment with highly mobile users, the migration of service requests from one cloud server to another due to user movement may frequently occur. We note that when the load offered to the cloud server is increased beyond the capacity limit, particularly when migrated traffic due to user movement suddenly appears, the probability to disrupt existing services gets higher, consequently resulting in the degradation of user quality of experience (QoE). To keep the service disruption probability at an acceptable level so as to maintain a high user-perceived QoE for different classes of multimedia services, this paper proposes a QoE-aware service continuity strategy for the cloud server in an MCC environment. The strategy is based on the buffer-occupancy threshold policy that differentiates newly arriving service requests coming from the mobile users and offers effective protection for migrated service requests against traffic fluctuation in newly arriving service requests. With the proposed strategy, the cloud server can dynamically change the buffer thresholds for different classes of service requests based on the offered traffic load and the user mobility to improve resource utilization, and, most importantly, to keep the service disruption probability at an acceptable level. Besides, by taking the effect of migrated traffic into account, we develop an analytical model to study the performance of the cloud server using the proposed strategy. With the analytical model, we propose an iterative method to determine the optimal buffer thresholds that maximize resource utilization while keeping an acceptable user QoE for different classes of services.