In mobile cloud networks (MCNs), a mobile user is connected with a cloud server through a network gateway, which is responsible for providing the required quality-of-service (QoS) to the users. If a user increases its service demand, the connecting gateway may fail to provide the requested QoS due to the overloaded demand, while the other gateways remain underloaded. Due to the increase in load in one gateway, the sharing of load among all the gateways is one of the prospective solutions for providing QoS-guaranteed services to the mobile users. Additionally, if a user misbehaves, the situation becomes more challenging. In this paper, we address the problem of QoS-guaranteed secured service provisioning in MCNs. We design a utility maximization problem for quality-assured secured load sharing (QuaLShare) in MCN, and determine its optimal solution using auction theory. In QuaLShare, the overloaded gateway detects the misbehaving gateways, and, then, prevents them from participating in the auction process. Theoretically, we characterize both the problem and the solution approaches in an MCN environment. Finally, we investigate the existence of Nash Equilibrium of the proposed scheme. We extend the solution for the case of multiple users, followed by theoretical analysis. Numerical analysis establishes the correctness of the proposed algorithms.Index Terms-Mobile cloud networking, auction theory, Nash equilibrium, bandwidth distribution, load sharing.
!
INTRODUCTIONN OW-A-DAYS mobile devices are inseparable components of our lives. Rapid reduction of hardware cost and the availability of numerous user-friendly applications such as health monitoring, gaming, entertainment, social networking, and trading applications make these devices more popular to the users. Despite the increase of usage of mobile devices, exploitation of their full functionalities is restricted by the limited energy supply, low bandwidth, low computational capacity, and seamless mobility. For overcoming these limitations, mobile devices are integrated with cloud computing in mobile cloud computing (MCC) systems. Mobile cloud networking (MCN), which one of the foundational aspects of MCC, is responsible for designing cost-efficient and secure service delivery across data communication networks. In MCN, a mobile user requests for expensive services to the cloud server though their respective interfacing gateways. The cloud server processes the service-requests, and, finally, provides the services to the users.