When Burstable Instances Meet Mobile Computing: Performance Modeling and Economic Analysis

This paper proposes a tandem fluid queue model for a mobile computing system with computation offloading and analytically derives its key quality-of-service (QoS) metric. Based on the performance model, we further evaluate the economic benefits of burstable instances, a new type of cloud instances that are recently introduced to the market, and make suggestions on whether burstable instances should be used for mobile computing to save users' costs under different wireless channel conditions and QoS requirements.