Abstract: Mobile cloud computing provides effective help for mobile users to migrate their workflow tasks to cloud servers for executing due to the mobile device’s limited hardware capability and battery energy carried. When scheduling workflow tasks between mobile devices and cloud servers, it needs to consider both the energy consumed by the mobile device and the total amount of time needed for the workflow application. Traditional methods for scheduling workflow tasks in mobile cloud computing usually address only one of two issues: saving energy consumption or minimizing the time needed. They fail to provide methods for jointly optimizing the time and energy consumption at the same time. Based on the relations of workflow tasks, the time needed in the workflow application is computed due to the tasks scheduling between the cloud servers and the mobile devices that use the technique of dynamic voltage and frequency scaling. The energy consumption for executing tasks on the cloud server and mobile devices are modeled and computed. The scheduling scheme and objective function for jointly optimizing the time needed and energy consumption are proposed. Algorithms based on the simulated annealing are designed for the mobile devices. Their time complexities are analyzed. Extensive experiments are conducted for comparing the proposed methods with other research works, and the experimental results demonstrate the correctness and effectiveness of our approaches.

Key words: mobile cloud computing, workflow, task scheduling, simulated annealing, multi-objective optimization