Device-to-device-based heterogeneous radio access network architecture for mobile cloud computing

The emerging heterogeneous mobile network architecture is designed for an increasing amount of traffic, quality requirements, and new mobile cloud computing demands. This article proposes a hierarchical cloud computing architecture to enhance performance by adding a mobile dynamic cloud formed by powerful mobile devices to a traditional general static cloud. A mobile dynamic cloud is based on heterogeneous wireless architecture where device-to-device communication is used for data transmission between user devices. The main advantage of the proposed architecture is an increase in overall capacity of a mobile network through improved channel utilization and traffic offloading from Long Term Evolution-Advanced to device-to-device communication links. Simulations show that the proposed architecture increases the capacity of a mobile network by up to 10 percent depending on the conditions and amount of offloaded data. The offloading probability is also evaluated by taking into consideration the number of devices in the cloudlet and the content matching values. We have gained insight into how content similarity affects offloading probability much more than the number of devices in a cloudlet.