Abstract
Offloading is an approach to leverage the severity of resource constrained nature of mobile devices (such as PDAs, mobile phones) by migrating part of the computation of applications to some nearby resource-rich surrogates (e.g., desktop PCs, mobility support stations). It is an essential mechanism for the execution of pervasive services. However, the mobile nature of mobile devices and the unstable connectivity of wireless links all render a less predictability of the performance of a pervasive service running under the control of offloading systems. This paper proposes an analytical model to express the performance of offloading systems in mobile wireless environments. We investigate the surrogate unreachability when mobile devices move following random waypoint (RWP) mobility scheme. We model the failure recovery time and total execution time of pervasive applications that run under the control of offloading systems. Detailed evaluation and analysis results are reported and the results of this paper can be used as design guidance for pervasive service offloading systems. © 2007 IEEE.