Performance analysis of mobile, edge and cloud computing platforms for distributed applications

Mobile devices and their corresponding services have become ubiquitous and vital components of almost every aspect of social and business life. Mobile services enhance collaboration, communication, monitoring, tracking, streaming, and many other applications. This intense and continuous engagement presents significant challenges due to mobile devices’ limited computation power, dependence on batteries, and sensitivity to transmission network capacity and availability. A common technique for resolving mobile shortcomings is to migrate (offload) complex computations to more powerful resources such as edges, clouds, mobile clouds or integration. However, the huge variety in mobile applications complicates alignment of the unique characteristics and user quality of service (QoS) requirements for each application to a convenient offloading plan. The availability of powerful resources at different computing layers is another challenge for offloading techniques. This chapter was designed to generate insights into ways the mobile communications industry could realise cost savings and high-quality data-aware offloading solutions by adopting new technologies such as edge computing and region-based local networks. To demonstrate these insights, this chapter provides an experimental work on how to select the best mobile-aware computing environment based on parameters including application type, data size and network bandwidth quality. Moreover, this chapter provides a comprehensive analysis that highlights the experiment results and provides recommendations for scheduling the execution of data-intensive applications on mobile-aware computation systems.