Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) paradigm includes all the emerging technological advances, mechanisms and schemes for the efficient resource offloading and the energy-efficient provision of services to mobile users. In addition, the mobile nodes will act as flexible networking points in emerging mobile networking architectures, where several challenges have to be addressed, like the high energy consumption and the data packets transmission failure, under a Mobile Peer-to-Peer (MP2P) approach. Towards addressing such challenges, several factors that contribute to the increased consumption of the energy, have to be investigated, as well as issues related with the loss of data during the provision of services. In this framework, a Traffic-based S-MAC scheme is proposed in this chapter, towards increasing the data exchange and minimize the energy consumption, between mobile nodes operating under an Ad-Hoc approach. The performance of the proposed scheduling scheme was thoroughly evaluated, through a number of simulation experiments.
TopI. Introduction
The portable devices (e.g. smart phones, tablets etc.) in emerging mobile network architectures have shrunk in size, incorporating advanced functions and mechanisms (Mastorakis, Mavromoustakis, Bourdena, Kormentzas & Pallis, 2013). This allows a node (or a mobile device) to act as a wireless terminal, or as a repeater creating a network for efficient resources sharing (Mavromoustakis, Dimitriou & Mastorakis, 2013). A self-organizing and adaptive collection of such mobile devices connected with wireless links is now referred to as a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (i.e. MANET). An Ad Hoc Network is not in need of any centralized control. The network should be able to detect any new nodes in range and induct them unobstructed (Mousicou, Mavromoustakis, Bourdena, Mastorakis, & Pallis, 2013). Nevertheless, if any node moves out of the range of the network, the remaining nodes should automatically reconfigure themselves, in order to adapt in the new topological scenario. A working group named MANET has been set up by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for promoting research in this area. Most usually, there are two types of architectures in Ad Hoc Networks: the flat and the hierarchical architecture (Chakrabarti & Mishra, 2001; Toh, 2002). Each node has a transceiver, an antenna and a power source. The properties of these nodes can vary regarding their size, transmission range, battery power and processing ability. It is common that some nodes can be used as servers, by lending themselves, others as clients and even some may be operational to act in conjunction (server and client), depending on the situation. There are specific cases though, where each node may need to act as a router, in order to channel information between nodes (Royer & Toh 1999; Haas & Tabrizi1998).
In this context, a Traffic Sensor Media Access Control (TS-MAC) protocol is examined in this chapter, based on S-MAC, a Sensor Media Access Control that uses three atypical techniques to reduce energy consumption and support self-configuration (Mavromoustakis, Bourdena, Mastorakis, Pallis, & Kormentzas, 2014). In order to bring energy consumption to the lowest level possible in listening to an idle channel, nodes periodically sleep (Mavromoustakis, Mousicou, Papanikolaou, Mastorakis, Bourdena, & Pallis, 2015). Neighboring nodes form virtual clusters so that they can auto-synchronize between sleep schedules. S-MAC, which was influenced by PAMAS, also sets nodes to sleep during transmissions of other nodes. Unlike PAMAS, it only uses in-channel signaling. Finally, S-MAC applies message passing to reduce contention latency for sensor-network applications that require store-and-forward processing as data move through the network (Ye, 2002). In addition, the latency, connectivity, energy and memory are the essential elements of today's mobile environments, whose performance may be significantly improved, by caching techniques. The TS-MAC protocol can be used in various topological patterns with varying packet sizes (Andreou, Mavromoustakis, Mastorakis, Bourdena, & Pallis, 2014).