Abstract
In recent years, the Smart City concept has become popular for its promise to improve the quality of life of urban citizens. The concept involves multiple disciplines, such as Smart health care, Smart transportation, and Smart community. Most services in Smart Cities, especially in the Smart healthcare domain, require the real-time sharing, processing, and analyzing of Big Healthcare Data for intelligent decision making. Therefore, a strong wireless and mobile communication infrastructure is necessary to connect and access Smart healthcare services, people, and sensors seamlessly, anywhere at any time. In this scenario, mobile cloud computing (MCC) can play a vital role by offloading Big Healthcare Data related tasks, such as sharing, processing, and analysis, from mobile applications to cloud resources, ensuring quality of service demands of end users. Such resource migration, which is also termed virtual machine (VM) migration, is effective in the Smart healthcare scenario in Smart Cities. In this paper, we propose an ant colony optimization-based joint VM migration model for a heterogeneous, MCC-based Smart Healthcare system in Smart City environment. In this model, the users mobility and provisioned VM resources in the cloud address the VM migration problem. We also present a thorough performance evaluation to investigate the effectiveness of our proposed model compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.